The Music Box That Wound Itself

My aunt was an odd, sharp, secretive woman, and when she died she left me exactly one thing: a small carved music box, old, foreign, heavy for its size. With it was a note in her hard slanted hand that said only: "Never let it finish the song. Stop it before the last note. Always."

I thought it was theatrics. My aunt liked a bit of drama and I assumed this was a last flourish, a spooky little joke to remember her by. I wound it once, out of curiosity, and it played a slow strange tune, pretty and off somehow, in a key that did not sit right. I let it wind down toward the end and, half laughing at myself, half not, I lifted the lid stopper and stopped it before the final note, because her note was right there and it seemed rude not to. Then I put it in a drawer and mostly forgot it.

Except it did not stay quiet. It started playing on its own at night. I would wake to that slow off tune coming from the drawer, faint, the drawer I kept locked, the box no one had wound. Every time, it played through the whole song and then stopped, on its own, one note before the end. It would reach that second-to-last note and simply stop, and hang there, in a silence that felt like something waiting, like a held breath, like it wanted the last note and could not play it itself.

I have never let it finish. Some nights, half asleep, I have wanted to. There is a pull to it, a curiosity that gets stronger the longer it goes on, a small voice that says just let it play the last note and see, what could one note do. That, I think, is exactly what my aunt was warning me about. That the wanting is the trap.

The box is still in the locked drawer. It still plays some nights and stops before the end. I have never let it finish and I never will, and when I die I am going to leave it to someone with the same note my aunt left me, and I hope to God they are as stubborn as I have been about that last note.