256 Hz

by Ross McMeekin

Please put your hands together for the choir and instrumentalists—they’re all volunteers, offering up their time for us. As they exit the stage, I’d also like to thank each and every one of you for coming. Recent events have led many newcomers to visit, so a special welcome to those. I hope you’ll find this morning’s service to be worth your time.

As you know, on August 6th, 2028, 1:24 pm Greenwich Time, everyone in the world began hearing what is commonly known as Middle C (256 Hz, to be exact). The note was sustained, continuous, uninterrupted, its volume high enough to be audible but low enough to where everyday noises could still be heard.

Soon it was universally accepted that not just some but all of humanity was indeed hearing 256 Hz, at all times—those previously without hearing included. As people mourned the loss of the relative or total silence they’d hitherto taken for granted, exploration of the phenomenon commenced. Medical research institutes ran studies to determine potential causes and correlations; Psychologists and sociologists redoubled efforts to study the mind both as an individual and collective entity; Religious leaders, philosophers, and historians scoured texts that might offer some explanation, and so on. Arguments ensued and groups factionated. Society fractured in new ways; in other ways, many of the old fractures grew deeper—some, also, healed.

Nothing was solved. In passing years, the pre-256 Hz era of silence faded from memory. Children and grandchildren born only ever hearing the note had to ask their elders what it was like beforehand. Certain silence—the absence of a sound—proved a difficult reality to describe. What was it like to not have 256 Hz? For those born after the change, it was impossible to truly know, because they had no experience of it, and their ancestors lacked the language to explain it in such a way that their progeny could grasp it, if there was a way to explain it at all. Always hearing 256 Hz had become the new version of silence. What was present became, because of its continual presence, absent.

Then, eighty years ago, on February 8, 2457, 3:44 pm Greenwich Time, the ever-present 256 Hz went silent again. Studies on that first arrival of 256 Hz hundreds of years ago were revived, theories flowered into worldviews, and actions were taken. And, in the way that some people mourned the loss of silence those centuries before, this time they mourned the loss of 256 Hz—their version of silence.

There is a sense of loss, still, even for those born after the silence—that sense that something more than just the note is missing. Yes, and many of us can still feel it, perhaps from the echoes of its memory, especially when music—like that of the choir and instrumentalists—is played. Accompanying that feeling of loss is the sense of impermanence that any profound change can bring about. Then, there’s the mystery as to why any of this happened in the first place. That lack of definitive explanations isn’t dissimilar to the questions many of us have about God, in the sense that God by definition can only be described insufficiently. There can be no period ending any sentence describing its existence and nature.

So, with the lack of any solid, incontrovertible explanation as to how 256 Hz happened and why it went away, I’d like to make an argument in the only form that seems appropriate. I will describe images, one after another, presenting them like a deck of cards being dealt face up. These could be any images in any order, though for simplicity’s sake I present them in such a way that some meaning can be easily assigned.

A collection of blue-green reeds swaying in a brackish marsh, purple bugs clinging to their shoots, molting, their husks dropping into the water to be gulped by amphibians resembling frogs in texture but having the shape and size of bricks. The onion smell of plant rot. Out from the shallows, wind carving arcs in tepid open water, exhaling as it passes through the reeds. The wind leaving the marsh, breathing across the muddy bank and over the bramble, breaking through the gaps between massive, ghost-white tree trunks and onward to the plain. More insects, tan beetles the size of frisbees, scuttling across the dry sand in what resembles a herd. Dust. Each second, thousands of clicks and clacks. Then, that same wind spraying sand from the top of a sunbaked dune pressing up against a formation of rock, in the middle of which stands the roughly triangular entrance to a cave.

In the cave, wind dying down, the form of a creature with a head and hide resembling an oxen but shaped like a human squats before a fire, heat warping the view above its flame, no smoke rising from the consumption of such dry sticks. The biped’s hair in whisps down its chest and along the side of its crying face. The ground, completely covered in reeds, still blue-green but beginning to dry. Laying there, a horn of a dead animal, an oxen, its keratin sheath glossy, cream, scar lines here and there, small dents. Light dancing against the rocky, crumbling walls of the den. Shadows scurrying like hens after seed.

The oxen-man picking up the horn. The oxen-man bringing it up to his lips and blowing a strong, single, sustained note. 256 Hz.

Now. Where did the sound come from? The horn of the beast? The ox-man playing the horn? The water nourishing the ox-man, keeping it alive so it might blow the horn? The sound came from all of that. We hear the sound but don’t recognize the countless sources it came from, because it came from everything, and everything—the word we assign to the totality of existence—is always here, so it feels like nothing. It’s not that we take it for granted, it’s that we don’t register it as being a part of our world at all. It’s 256 Hz to the mind that’s never known any different. It begs the question: what notes are we hearing right now without realizing it? Is an absence of sound in fact a whole chorus of sounds to which we’ve become too accustomed to notice?

By next week, I believe, all of us in our current form will be dead, as will every living being on our planet. I suspect many of you were hoping for a different prediction. I can see some of you already leaving. But this isn’t the first time an asteroid has struck our planet, nor will it be the last. Perhaps what we refer to as God isn’t sending the asteroid, as some have suggested. Perhaps the asteroid is God—if by God we mean all. Yes, perhaps this asteroid striking our planet is God clapping its hands. Or perhaps it is a horn-blasted 256 Hz, returning in a different form, until it also fades into nothing, which is to say, everything.

I’d like to invite the choir and instrumentalist back up to the podium. All rise before our end. Let us greet it with song.

Ross McMeekin is author of the novel Pepperleaf, which came out from Thirty West Publishing House in May of 2026, as well as a recent story collection, Below the Falls (Thirty West, 2024). His writing has appeared in publications such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Literary Hub, Ploughshares Blog, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He’s a recipient of writing fellowships from Hugo House and Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle.