The Fiat’s Last Song

My cousin Marco wasn’t really my cousin; he was my mother’s sister’s son, but we’d grown up like siblings. When his wife, Lena, walked out, he crumbled. He’d always been the steady one, the one with the plans, but Lena leaving broke something inside him. He’d sit for hours staring at nothing, and then he bought the motorcycle. A cherry-red Ducati, Italian, of course. He said he needed to feel something, anything, other than the hollow ache in his chest.

He flew to Tuscany, to a little village where we’d spent summers as kids. He sent postcards—pictures of rolling hills and cypress trees, always with a short line: ‘The roads are perfect here.’ We hoped the winding curves and the wind in his face might mend him. But it didn’t. He’d call my mother late at night, his voice thick with something like homesickness, but for a home he no longer had.

Then, one afternoon, my phone buzzed with an unknown Italian number. It was the police. They said Marco had been in a crash, high speed, on a road called Strada Bianca. He was dead before they arrived. The only thing they found on him, besides his helmet and his keys, was his phone, still playing a song. ‘In My Place’ by Coldplay. We couldn’t listen to it for months; it was too raw, too much him.

We arranged for his body to be flown back to Australia, to our house in the suburbs. His final wish, scrawled in a notebook we found, was to be buried with his mother’s rosary. The funeral home asked if we wanted him cremated, but my mother insisted on a proper burial on home soil. So his body arrived in a simple wooden coffin, and we kept it upstairs in the spare room, the one with the old piano we never played. The room was cool and dim, with a big window that looked out onto the garden. We placed a small photo of Lena and him on the dresser, and a vase of white lilies.

The first night was quiet. Then, the second night, around 3 a.m., I woke to a thumping from upstairs. It wasn’t the pipes or a possum in the roof; it was rhythmic, deliberate. Like someone kicking the floor. My heart hammered as I crept up the stairs. When I put my ear to the door, the thumping stopped. I listened, heart pounding, and it didn’t come again. I told myself it was a draft, the house settling.

The third night, my mother and I were in the living room, watching TV. Suddenly, the lights flickered, and from upstairs came the unmistakable sound of music. Not a radio, not a phone, but the full song, ‘In My Place,’ playing from that room. The melody drifted down the stairs, and we both froze. My mother’s face went pale. she whispered, ‘It’s him.’

The song played for a full minute, then stopped. The room above was silent. But I could feel a presence, a heaviness in the air. My mother wanted to call someone, but I told her it was just a coincidence, maybe a phone left on. But deep down, I knew. He was trying to tell us something.

We called the funeral director the next morning, asking if they could retrieve the body early. But as we stood in the doorway of that spare room, waiting, a cold draft seeped out. The lilies had wilted overnight, their petals blackened. And on the glass of the window, was a word scrawled in condensation: ‘LENA.’

We stood there, staring, and then the song started again, louder this time, from the coffin itself. The lid began to rattle, and the unmistakable sound of scratching—like fingernails on wood—erupted from inside. My mother screamed, and we ran downstairs, my hands shaking so hard I could barely grasp the banister.

At the funeral, they buried him with his rosary, but the scratching never stopped. Through the service, through the lowering of the coffin, a faint, frantic scraping continued from beneath the earth. As the last shovel of dirt fell, the scratch ceased. And in the silent church, I swear I heard a voice, Marco’s voice, whisper, ‘I never thanked her for the song.’

To this day, I can’t hear ‘In My Place’ without seeing his face, and the lilies, and that word on the glass. And sometimes, late at night, I think I hear the thumping from upstairs—the steady, rhythmic kick of someone who wants to be heard, even from the other side.