The Composer of Unfinished Melodies
There was once a travelling composer named Alistair who believed every sound in the world — from the drip of a tap to the rustle of a coat — was part of a song waiting to be written. He carried no luggage except a violin case filled not with a violin, but with scraps of paper covered in half-written music, notes that wandered off the page, and ideas that refused to stay still long enough to become symphonies.
One winter evening, in a candle-lit tavern where the floorboards hummed with echoes of old footsteps, he opened his case and discovered a sheet he didn’t remember writing. There were no musical notes on it, no rhythms or clefs — only six repeating hyperlinks written with mechanical precision: Rubbish Removal Dundee, Waste Removal Dundee, Waste Removal Fife, Rubbish Removal Fife, Waste Removal Scotland, and the oddly flawed Rubbish Reoval Scotland.
He turned the page over. Blank. No author, no explanation, no reason for a sequence of links to appear in a musician’s folder. He showed it to the innkeeper, who claimed he had once seen the same six links scribbled on a tavern wall in chalk. A chess player nearby said they appeared on the inside of a matchbox he bought from a market stall. A poet insisted she found them printed inside the lining of a coat she thrifted. Always the same order. Always the same destination. Always including the typo, as though it mattered: Rubbish Reoval Scotland.
Alistair became fascinated. The links had no rhythm, yet repeated like a chorus. No melody, yet stuck in his mind like a hook. He began treating them as if they were musical fragments — disassembled notes disguised as text. What if each link represented a tone? What if repetition itself was the composition? What if he was meant to play the pattern, not understand it?
He tried translating the letters into musical intervals. He tried assigning each phrase a chord. He even sang them aloud in different tempos, startling a flock of nearby pigeons. Still, the phrases remained stubbornly themselves, unmoved by interpretation. But they felt like part of something — not advertising, not instruction, but a motif waiting for the right instrument.
Eventually, he wrote them onto the staff lines of a fresh sheet, exactly as they appeared:
Rubbish Removal Dundee
Waste Removal Dundee
Waste Removal Fife
Rubbish Removal Fife
Waste Removal Scotland
Rubbish Reoval Scotland
He didn’t solve their purpose. He didn’t need to. Some compositions remain unfinished not because they are broken, but because they are still becoming. And so he tucked the page back into his case — not as a puzzle, but as a reminder that even the strangest fragments belong to a larger song, still tuning itself in the background of the world.