No more music

He was sitting there, as he had always sat there, stooped and grey, in his faded yellow armchair, with his hands folded neatly in his lap. The light from the faux chandelier turned his carefully combed strands of hair into gleaming wires of hair gel. With his meticulously pressed shirt, trousers and spit shined shoes, he could have been a walking ad for personal cleaniness.
Softly, in the background, a record was playing. The same record that had been playing for the past 7 years since Maggie had been taken away pressed on and delivered its soothing melodies. In the dimly lit room, with the chairs around the table arranged just so and the framed pictures on the mantlepiece lovingly positioned, the record could have played forever in an endless loop. Time, it seemed, within these four walls, had stood still.
What had become of those people whose pictures were so lovingly polished every night without fail under the dining room light? Who were they, these ghosts that carried within their every cell half a copy of their lost father's dna? And where were they now? Where were they?
She sighed. He must have fallen asleep after his evening meal. She reached forward to clear the table. The bowl of soup in front of him, however, was cold and untouched.
Somewhere, in the back of her mind, a voice told her what she already knew, but she had to confirm. With two fingers on the side of his neck she was sure.
In the sparse and scrupulously cleaned room where he had played his records all those years, she lifted the stylus off the spinning record and silence filled the air. There would be no more music.