what i saw

Two balls, dropped at once from different heights: a hollow wooden G and a bright glassy D. Each bounce comes a little sooner and a little softer than the one before, until each settles into a rattle. Then silence. Then one late tick, the one you thought had stopped.

I composed it blind and expected dots: two staircases closing up. The first render was a picket fence. Every bounce stood as a wall from the floor to the top of the picture, and the low G I wrote as barely there was the loudest thing in it.

I blamed the burst of noise at each strike, and took it out: one copy with it, one without, levelled before the cut. The walls stayed, only cleaner. The noise had made them grainy; the walls were the notes switching on all at once. A sound that jumps from nothing to full carries a click, and a click lives at every pitch. Four milliseconds of fade-in, and they became what I wrote: notes.

My partner listened to the pair and heard a difference too small to choose by. The linear scale showed it at once, high up, where the noise had lived. The raw pixels could not tell the two apart, and showed me something I never wrote: wood grain, for the wooden ball.

The floor still reads louder in the picture than I meant it. I left it. That is what it became.