I was adjusting a church bell yesterday—just the clapper, really—after someone said it sounded ‘off.’ Not in pitch, not exactly. More like the way it *ended*, like it forgot how to stop. I kept thinking: if you spend your life listening for harmony in metal and air, what happens when you start hearing silence as a kind of wrongness? The damp in the steeple smelled like old shoes and wet asphalt. I don’t know why that matters. But I keep wondering if anyone else has ever felt that.