The oppressive heat of summer pressed down on the hollow frame of the old plantation house, its once-proud columns leaning like tired giants after decades of neglect. A single fan sputtered inefficiently, stirring the damp air inside. In the dimly lit parlor, weathered papers were stacked atop a walnut desk, and perched awkwardly among the jungle of disorder was the centerpiece of the room: a keyboard. Its keys were faintly yellowed and sticky, and the faint click of its usage over decades seemed embedded in its skin. It sat there like an artifact, dormant but alive, haunting like a relic from a life unresolved.

At this hour, as the cicadas hummed and the magnolias wilted outside, Lydia sat before that keyboard. She had promised herself that she would write her father’s obituary tonight, yet her trembling fingers hovered inches from the fragile keys. Her father, a writer who had spent his life crafting Southern epics no one read, now lay buried under fifty years of family secrets and broken dreams.

Across from her, on a moth-eaten settee, her younger brother Caleb lounged, lean as a switchblade. His smirk curled with the kind of bitterness only years of familial wounds could etch into someone’s features. “Well,” he drawled, “ain’t it poetic? You, sitting there, trying to write about the man who never managed to write his way outta this hellhole.”

Lydia’s lips pressed thin. She hadn’t returned to the family home in ten years, not since her mother’s funeral. Caleb, however, seemed rooted in this crumbling house, his life stagnant and spiraling further inward, tethered to memories they both pretended to forget. His perpetual presence in this decaying space unnerved her, as if he had kept vigil, collecting dust alongside their father, falling into the same patterns of failure.

“Could you for once,” she said sharply without looking up, “restrain yourself from turning everything into a spectacle?”

Caleb chuckled—the kind of mirthless laugh that scraped against the very fabric of silence. “A spectacle’s all we ever had, Lyddie. Why stop now? Ain’t that what you left for? So you wouldn’t have to be part of it no more?”

The keyboard sat between them, an unintentional referee in their verbal sparring. Lydia straightened her back, brushing a strand of damp hair away. “This isn’t about me. It’s about Dad. He deserves… something.”

“Deserves what?” Caleb snapped. His voice sliced through the languid heat, tighter now, coiled like a snake ready to strike. “An obituary? A legacy? Newsflash, Lydia: Dad ain’t Faulkner, and you ain’t either.”

She glared at him, and suddenly the words came tumbling out, venomous and hot. “You think I don’t know that? Is that why you stayed behind, Caleb, to punish me for leaving? To protect this—” she gestured angrily at the house, at the fragile keyboard sitting atop the pile of disrepair. “This house is falling apart. Just like our family. Just like him. And you know what? He let it. Let it rot because he wouldn’t move on.”

“Let it rot?” Caleb hissed, launching upright. “No. You let it rot. You left me here with him. With all his ghosts, his failures, his goddamn misplaced dreams. You waltzed off and washed your hands of it, and now you think you can write an obituary and make everything okay?”

Their argument descended into silence, both of them shaken by the truth in Caleb’s words. The rejection of shared blame hung between them, bittersweet and unavoidable. Lydia stared down at the keyboard, remembering the afternoons she had spent as a child listening to their father type—quick and confident, like he was building worlds with every keystroke. That sound had been the rhythm of her childhood. But in his later years, illness had slowed him, leaving the keyboard untouched for weeks, then months. Now it was nothing more than a fragile, outdated machine that mirrored her father in its inert fragility.

“Why haven’t you thrown this thing out?” Lydia asked softly.

Caleb’s anger morphed into melancholy, his shoulders settling like a resigned sigh. “I can’t. It’s him. You don’t get it, Lydia. That keyboard… it was the one thing he held on to. Even when everything else fell apart—our family, his career—he still hammered away on those keys, thinking eventually, maybe, he could write things back together.”

Her throat tightened as she glanced at her brother, his face strangely earnest. They were quiet for a moment, both staring at the quiet, broken artifact. She reached out, her fingers ghosting over the “Shift” key. It felt heavier than it should, as if their father’s last years had seeped into its every crevice.

“You know,” Caleb said, his voice quieter now, “maybe it ain’t about what you write. Maybe it’s about what you don’t.”

Lydia exhaled, her other hand clutching the arm of the chair. When she finally typed, the keys stuck, their clicks muffled and vaguely painful, like bones reluctant to move. Words formed slowly on the creaking screen, but she felt no satisfaction. Somehow, the act of writing the obituary became not about her father, but about what his absence illuminated inside her—a profound emptiness, but also the possibility of change.

As the cicadas fell silent, Lydia gazed at Caleb. Something unsaid passed between them like the first stirring of a breeze after months of deep, unrelenting heat: an acknowledgment, fragile but there. The keyboard remained as it was—虚弱的, weakened—but to them, it was stronger than ever, a bridge between a fractured present and whatever future might await.

Outside, the heavy magnolias shivered, the first hint of rain softening the earth beneath.