There isn't a gravestone yet. The earth, overturned, is still damp and new to the feeling of sunlight. Emmeline stands at the side of the grave and tries to work out what she is supposed to be thinking. Everyone is just looking at the box in the ground, the box with the body in it, the body that used to have Adelaide in it. It began raining while they were still in the church, a small, nondescript building with a roof that made it look as though it was part of a playset - the gentle tapping of it landing on the coffin now reminds her of fingertips on a windowpane. The kind of touch that happens instinctually. Like the urge to press piano keys, or push toes into sand. She breathes in and feels the weight of her body, feels it ache to be the one in the grave. She breathes out and lets the desire go with it.

A magpie lands on the pile of dirt and Emmeline watches as the person nearest to it attempts to scare it away. The blue sheen of the oil-black wings glints as it leaps into the air, rain being cast off of the slick feathers - she thinks that Adelaide probably wouldn't have minded the magpie's presence. Maybe she'd have laughed or tried to encourage it into her palms. Maybe the bird could sense that - maybe dying cannot erase the kind of soul-deep warmth that some people possess. Energy is energy; Adelaide has to be somewhere, in some form. Maybe she is here.

As soon as the possibility awakens she knows it isn't true. If Adelaide is sentient, even one atom of her, she'll be taking the vast ocean of death as an excuse to swim across the sky, or see the canyons of the moon, or watch a sunrise on the other side of the planet. She doesn't know if death works like that, but she hopes so. She hopes Adelaide is scattered across the horizon, not buried here in the earth. It doesn't have the strength to hold all of her, anyway.

The drizzle thickens, grows: all of a sudden, they are standing in a downpour. People murmur, or perhaps they scream - all she can hear is the rain. It's very grand. Emmeline looks up, tilts her face into it and lets the water wash her away. She wants it inside her lungs. The clouds above are elephant grey and low-hanging, weighed down and darkened by their communal grief. You shouldn't have taken her, she thinks, desperately, pointlessly; I need her more. More than what she doesn't know, but everything in her is so sad that it hurts, and she wishes her ankles would shatter so that she could look how she feels. She'd have to cry, then, and she's not been able to yet. She wants to collapse. She wants the black hole in her stomach to swallow more than her hunger; wants to just stop, for a moment. Everything is wrong. These are feelings too dark for poetry. She knows - she has tried, has written for hours onto the pages of her journal, an exercise like letting blood. She wants it out, now, the noise in her heart is becoming unbearable. She misses the ease with which she used to play piano - now each piece is exhausting. She cannot practice without remembering, and remembering is difficult. Worse even than the remembering is the ending of it: when she pushes herself through, re-lives those golden hours in that golden room, the silence that follows is violent.

When the music stops, the world stops. That was something Adelaide had said once. It was meant as nothing more than some poetic musing, cast out into the universe - there is a stillness that follows music, a space occupied only by breathing and emotion, a stillness like religion. A gap too clean and empty to fill with other noise. Emmeline had loved the phrase and clung to it, sought and found proof in the fragile, charged moments post-performance just before applause; in the way her grandmother rested her hand on top of her record player, eyes closed, for a second before resuming the rest of her life. Now it feels like a kind of warning. Adelaide and all the music in her have stopped, but they have left dead air, none of the promised serenity at all. She wonders if it's possible to be betrayed by words or a dead woman. Everything is wrong, she thinks again, clenches her fists and tries not to fall apart. Adelaide gone, her grief too loud for writing about and then, from nowhere- a miracle.

Where before there was one there are, suddenly, impossibly, a dozen magpies, no longer on the earth but in it, leaving tiny footprints on the lid of the coffin. There is no way for them to be here - no reason, no cause, no anything, and yet, here they are. One looks at Emmeline, or at least she thinks it does, and she holds its curious little black gaze until one of the miserable assembly comes to their senses and tries to shoo the crowd away. She doesn't know the right word for a group of magpies - she knows crows is murder and dolphins is school and (although she can't think where she'd have learnt this) a group of larks is called an exaltation. Watching them now, she thinks magpies should be something like mourning or poem.

Too late, she puts up an umbrella. She'd forgotten she was holding it - it is black, and she resents it. There is too much black here. If they are saying goodbye, if this is the send-off, there should be yellow, gold, immeasurable colour and beauty and abundance and ceremony, not sadness behind a church. Adelaide wasn't even religious - she doesn't know who organised the funeral but she is angry for a moment until she realises that the magpies aren't leaving, instead are entirely disregarding the flapping hands and barked shouts meant to spur them on. This is the kind of odd that fascinates her, and she stares and stares and tries to work out how to rationalise them. Then - eye contact, entirely unexpected. The boy must have been standing opposite her the entire time but she equally feels as though he has appeared, just now, this second. His eyes are familiar, arresting, a shade darker brown than his curiously freckled skin, and they are hollow enough that she is reminded of the magpie's gaze. Their eye contact stretches taut until a thump above her head makes her jolt and she looks up and sees for a fraction of a second that the material of her umbrella has been replaced by blue-black feathers before something lands on her arm and she whirls, dropping it. A magpie. Its clawed feet dig into her hand and she knows that it cannot be real but she also feels that it is. The rest of the funeral guests - are you a guest at a funeral? - are preoccupied, suddenly back to listening to whoever is speaking and Emmeline is so completely overtaken by the notion that she must be invisible because no-one is noting the bird on her hand (lighter than she expected) when it launches from its perch and flies so that it eclipses the sun for a second.

"Emmeline?"

The voice is so real that the moments before, even though they have only just passed, are immediately given the surreal quality of a dream, and she turns again, heart beating, to face the boy. He looks at her, just looks, and then she recognises him and memory floods through her. She doesn't know how it could possibly have taken her this long. "Otho?"

Adelaide's son had been introduced to her very early on in their lessons. He'd burst into the room, rambling about something with an intense, concentrated energy that had taken her by surprise. When he'd noticed her, he'd spooked, stopped talking immediately, a reaction that she'd thought was strikingly similar to when her cat caught sight of its own reflection. At that moment she'd felt a buzzing in her fingertips - a dizzying feeling of I know you before she'd even spoken to him. The way he'd frozen was as familiar to her as anything. She'd assumed then that talking to or in front of strangers was a talent that came with adulthood, neatly packaged alongside knowing where to sit and an ability to understand when it was appropriate to laugh.

'Emmeline, this is Otho,' Adelaide had said, holding her hand in one of her own and this boy's in the other. 'If you know me, then you must know him too. Otho, this is Emmeline. She is a new student of mine. Come in, darling.' He'd been watching her from the doorway with a kind of hesitant interest. She'd been watching back.

Now he stands in front of her and she tries not to let her sadness show. He has far more of his own than he can bear, she knows, seeing the way grief pushes his shoulders down, makes his hands fold themselves into knots and steals his breath. She wants to write a poem about the physicality of it. For the first time in months, the words collect on her tongue. She pictures them like gasoline, wants to strike a match.

"Hello," she says, and it's like flint on steel. He starts like he'd not been expecting her to speak, flexes his fingers, meets her gaze for a moment and then-

"Sorry," He says, and stumbles away.

She stands alone for a second, watches him disappear behind the crowd, frozen. They have started to drop handfuls of earth on top of the coffin, the magpies abruptly not-there. The sombre performance of it makes her mouth taste like iron and dirt. She closes her eyes, feels the rainwater from her hair drip onto her neck, tries not to flinch as the sound of the soil hitting the wood. It sounds far too much like knocking. She makes up her mind.