The cicadas in Louisiana don't sing. They scream. They scream from every cypress tree and every broken fence post and every patch of kudzu that has swallowed something that used to be a house. The sound is so constant that after a while you stop hearing it, which is not the same as being free of it. You just learn to carry it the way you learn to carry a weight—by letting it become your posture.

Elise Boudreaux walked up the gravel drive of Ashwood Manor on a Tuesday in August 1954, and the first thing she noticed was that the gate had no lock. The second thing she noticed was that the fountain in the front courtyard was dry and full of leaves. The third thing she noticed was the smell—magnolia and rot, the particular Louisiana scent that is half beauty and half surrender.

She was nineteen. She wore a navy dress her grandmother had bought her at a department store in New Orleans when she was sixteen, and she carried a small handkerchief in her pocket because her grandmother had told her that ladies always carry a handkerchief and Elise wanted to be a lady even if nobody was watching.

The door opened before she could knock. A woman in her sixties, wearing a dress that had been fashionable before the war and had not changed its mind since, looked at her with eyes that had seen enough of the world to stop being surprised by it.

"Miss Boudreaux," the woman said. "I'm Mère Delmonico. Come in. It's hot enough to fry an egg on the porch, and I don't suppose you brought one."

Elise stepped into the foyer. The ceiling was high—too high for the amount of light the windows let in. The floor was marble, but the marble had gone dull and was veined with damp. Portraits lined the walls, their faces faded to the color of weak tea. In one, a woman in a white dress looked out at Elise with eyes that seemed to follow her across the room.

"You'll be singing in the Grand Salon," Mère said. "We have a small gathering. Friends, family, people my age who remember when this house had music in it. You don't have to sing much. Two pieces in the evening. That's all."

"Two pieces," Elise said. "I know two pieces."

Mère studied her. "Good. That's enough."

Elise was shown to a small bedroom on the second floor. It had been a nursery, once. The bed was wide enough for three children, and the wallpaper had been painted over so many times that the pattern showed through in places like a memory refusing to be erased.

She unpacked nothing. She had brought only what she was wearing and a hymnal her grandmother had given her. She sat on the bed and read a chapter from the hymnal—Psalm 23, the one her mother had memorized and sang when the pneumonia made it hard for her to breathe—and then she went downstairs to find the salon.

The Grand Salon was exactly as she expected: large, faded, and trying very hard to be what it had been. Crystal chandeliers that had lost most of their drops. Velvet curtains the color of dried blood. A grand piano that was slightly out of tune.

She sang two pieces. A spiritual—"Go Down Moses"—and a hymn—"Be Thou My Vision." Her voice was clear and unadorned, the kind of voice that doesn't need decoration because the decoration is in the notes themselves.

From the staircase, Thomas Ashwood watched her.

He had not come downstairs for a gathering in twenty years. He knew that the house remembered visitors—knew the way a house knows the weight of footsteps and the frequency of voices. But he had stopped remembering how to be in rooms with other people a long time ago.

Mère Delmonico had insisted he come. "It would do you good," she had said. "To hear something that isn't the radio."

He stood on the staircase and listened to Elise's voice go through "Go Down Moses" and felt something in his chest that had been asleep for fifteen years open its eyes and look around.

After the performance, she walked through the house. The Grand Salon was magnificent but suffocating. The library had a fireplace that had not been lit since at least 1938. The dining room table was set for twelve but served four at most—and those four were plates that nobody touched.

In one room, she found an easel. On it was a painting—a portrait of a woman in a white dress, seated in a chair, with her hands folded in her lap. The face had been scratched out. Not painted over. Scratched. With something sharp. The scratches were deep, and the canvas was torn in places, and the hands and the dress and the chair were all still visible, as if the person who did this had been trying to destroy only the face while preserving everything else.

She stood in front of the painting for a long time.

"You shouldn't be in here," said a voice behind her.

She turned. Thomas Ashwood was standing in the doorway. He was taller than she expected, and thinner, and he wore his thinness the way the house wore its peeling paint—with a kind of tired resignation.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"It's not—this room isn't open to guests."

"I wasn't going to—"

He looked at the painting. "That's my mother."

"Your mother?"

"Yes." He walked to the easel and stood in front of it the way soldiers stand in front of a flag they've been ordered to lower. "She died when I was nine. My sister died an hour later. The midwife said it was a complication. I was too young to know that midwives sometimes lie."

"Who scratched it out?"

He was silent for a moment. "I don't know. I came home from school one day and it looked like that. I've left it like that because I don't know what else to do with it."

"Why leave it at all?"

"Because it's the only picture of her that exists."

They stood in the room together. The cicadas screamed outside. The paint on the walls was peeling in slow strips, like bark.

"This house," Elise said, "it remembers things."

Thomas looked at her. "Everything remembers things here. Even the things that want to be forgotten."

"Your mother," she said, "she was beautiful."

He smiled—not a happy smile. A tired one. "Yes. I think she was. I don't remember. But everyone says so."

"Your voice," she said. "You sing, don't you?"

He looked at her sharply. "No."

"You have the face of someone who sings in his head."

He was quiet. Then: "What do you sing in your head?"

"Usually hymns. Sometimes nothing. When I'm tired, I sing nothing. That's the loudest thing there is."

He looked at her then—the way he had looked at the painting, with the careful attention of someone who has forgotten what it feels like to see something clearly.

The second evening, she sang again. Same pieces. Mère Delmonico was pleased. "Beautiful voice," she told her afterward. "You remind me of a singer I knew once. In New Orleans. Singing in church. I forget the name."

"Maybe it was me," Elise said.

Mère considered this. Then laughed—a real laugh, unexpected and unpracticed. "No. That was years ago. You were a child."

"I'm not that old."

"Not that old," Mère agreed. "But old enough to know the difference between singing for money and singing for something else."

Elise didn't answer. She didn't know how.

The third and final evening, a storm rolled in from the Gulf. Not a gentle Louisiana rain—a real storm, the kind that makes the sky turn the color of a bruise and the air get so thick you have to pull it through your lungs with both hands.

The power went out at eight. Candlelight appeared in the Grand Salon like a miracle performed by servants. Mère Delmonico sat in her armchair, surrounded by candles and old friends and the ghost of a house that had once been full of children and music and noise.

Elise was asked to sing one last song. By candlelight.

She opened her mouth. The first note came out cracked. She stopped.

Thomas, sitting in the front row, said quietly: "You don't have to."

She closed her eyes. And began again.

A different song this time. A lullaby. The one her mother sang when the pneumonia made her cough so hard Elise thought she would break. It was soft and slow and had only three verses. Elise sang it softly, the way you sing to a sleeping child—not to be heard, but to be felt.

Mère Delmonico closed her eyes. The old friends closed their eyes. Thomas kept his open.

When she finished, the candle on the nearest table had burned itself out. In the darkness that followed, Thomas said: "Stay."

It was not a request. It was an admission. The kind of word that carries the weight of everything you haven't said.

She said nothing. The storm peaked. Lightning illuminated the room in a flash of white that lasted less than a second but was long enough to see everything.

In that light, the scratched-out portrait was visible. And behind the scratches, faintly, barely, there was a second face. Painted over. Hidden. Someone had painted a woman's face over the portrait and then someone else had scratched it out.

Two people. Two attempts at erasure.

The lightning faded. The room was dark again.

The next morning, Elise took the bus back to New Orleans at dawn. The bag she had brought contained only what she had brought. But in her pocket, she found a tube of paint—magnolia white—from Thomas's studio. She had picked it up without thinking. Or perhaps she had picked it up thinking exactly.

She never went back.

She heard five years later that Ashwood Manor had burned down. Arson, they said in New Orleans. Nobody knew who lit the match. Mère Delmonico had moved to a small apartment in the Garden District. Thomas Ashwood had not been seen in public for months.

Elise was singing at a funeral in the Ninth Ward when she heard the news. She was singing "I'll Fly Away"—not her choice, the widow's choice—and when the words came, she stopped in the middle of the second verse.

The widow, sitting in the front row, had a face that looked exactly like the portrait Elise had seen in the dark. The one that had been painted over and scratched out and painted over again. Three attempts. One face. Three people who had tried to decide who this woman was allowed to be.

Elise finished the song. She sang every note. She sang it clearly. She sang it for the widow, for the portrait, for Thomas Ashwood and his house that remembered things, for the cicadas screaming in every cypress tree in Louisiana, for the magnolia white paint that had survived in her pocket through bus rides and hotel rooms and funerals and the long slow drift of a life that was not what she had planned but was, in its way, her own.

---

Author Note & Copyright:

© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- シュバッパスホイシャチー[⾘、　] 中国 ویگ ⭑⭰ Росусуттет Мецесесцесцес Дкедошенн 🎉 Passnummer عرق جراز سفر CHN Passport)

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