08-07-2020, 11:56 PM
She has known the silence for as long as she has known anything - known the existence of it but not the absence, for how could one miss a stranger they’ve never met. She has seen the evidence of it, too - a roosting bird set loose from a low branch long before motion warns that a predator is nearby, or the small brown mouse that scurries away into its den seconds before a wide-winged shadow streaks past like a phantom beneath the sun. In the wildest storms she has even felt sound, felt the vibration of stone against her shoulder while she waits in the gut of a cave for the rain to pass.
Sound is a ghost, but she does know it exists, even if not for her.
And it’s okay, because she’s come to believe maybe she is a ghost, too.
So it feels like a dream when suddenly her mind is filled with something she can barely fathom, with noise that is like melody, sounds all strung together like shining lights and etched at all their edges with a vibration she imagines she can feel in her temples and her cheeks and those violet lips that part in quiet wonder. <i>‘There is something I would ask of you. Meet me at the beach.’</i> She clings to each word like one might cling to a lover, exploring each curve of every syllable before moving on to marvel at the next. She tries to repeat them back, like saying them aloud might forever carve them into her memory, but when she speaks there is no sound. There is nothing at all and the loss is an agony that is entirely new to her. <i>The beach.</i> She thinks, almost feverish with the need to hear more of that voice in her head, more words she understands when she has no right to.
The beach.
It is another thing she knows to exist, but not from personal experience. Her home is among forests made of trees instead of bones, with branches instead of broken ribcages. There are flowers full of butterflies instead of bellies full of rot and festering maggot. But these are not things that seem to hold any kind of weight in her thoughts as she makes her way towards this new true-north her heart clings to so naively, towards the potential for more of the voice that had filled her mind and built a home there like a cuckoo, chasing everything else away. It is her own gratification she thinks of as she follows the river west to the ocean, and then further still. And though she has memorized every word he carved into her mind - every pause and syllable, the exact tone and shape of every word - she has neglected to consider what it is that he might ask of her. In her gentle wonder, she thinks there is nothing she wouldn’t give him in thanks for this gift.
She knows she’s arrived more by smell than anything else - it is a cloying kind of stink that greets her readily, climbing her legs and over her dark skin until it touches the violet points of her delicate face and climbs into her nose to fester. It is the first warning, the first feeling of doubt creeping in as those quiet brown eyes slowly take everything in. There is a crowd gathering together like drops of dew in the belly of a leaf, pulled together by the gravity of a man who isn’t a man at all. Does she even belong here? But then he speaks, and even though the rest of the world is entirely silent, the waves crashing soundlessly and the scavenger birds with beaks hanging open in a noiseless, perpetual shriek, his voice is exactly as she remembers and she is soothed again.
But these words are different than the ones that came before, and even though she finds herself still bashfully enamored with the sound of his voice, with the fact that sound even exists at all, she can also feel the start of unease prickle along her spine. She catches like a burr on the phrase <i>see what things lie beyond the world of death</i>, feeling warmth drain from her body as though someone has filled her with holes. She wants to tell him that she is sorry, that she isn’t made for a task like this. Isn’t strong or clever or brave, isn’t any shade of remarkable. But no one else moves, no one speaks unless they are doing so without moving their lips, and so she is quiet too (as if she has a choice, as if she had any idea how to build words and string them together in this beautiful way that he can). She has already decided she will not go, but her head turns and that gentle gaze wanders along the beach in the direction he tells them, wondering not how one might enter the afterlife, but instead what a buzzing noise might sound like. It is a curiosity that makes her smile in a quiet, secret way.
Or at least it did, until he pauses and looks at them and tells them to die. It is nonsensical and surreal, and she frowns and steps back, uncomfortable but unafraid until the dying begins.
When it is her turn, she is like a doe beneath that gaze of stone, trapped by his immensity and her own insufficiencies. She can hardly stand the way he watches her, like he knows things she does not, like she is a cockroach he’s just found hiding in his home. For a moment nothing happens and she wonders if she’ll be free to leave after all, if he can see that she is not strong or brave or special, that she is no good for this task. She takes a step back, turns, though her quiet eyes have found a gravity in him that feels wholly impossible to sever.
Then she hears it, hears everything in sudden, soft clarity. The wind in her own hair, the wind in his, in the sand and the bones and the wasted bodies she is so earnestly trying not to notice. She can hear the carrion birds and those cawing, shrieking sounds, the ones that must go with those gaping beaks she had noticed earlier. She can hear the ocean and all of its immensity - the distant waves like a whisper, and the nearest ones like a whoosh-shush as they collide with the beach and disappear. It is so beautiful, so painfully perfect that she is finally able to tear her eyes from him so she can turn and look to take it all in. There is such a gentle kind of love in her eyes, such a wistful smile on those pale violet lips. She almost doesn’t notice how the sound is climbing, how the serenity of the world around them is creeping towards storm, and then from storm to inferno as she winces back and away, all wild eyes and pain. The wind is a whistle in her ears, the birds a blade with their screaming so amplified. The ocean has given up whispering for shouting, for a sound that even now continues to change as she backs away mindlessly, the whites of her eyes flashing.
<i>She has known the silence for as long as she has known anything - known the existence of it but not the absence, for how could one miss a stranger they’ve never met.</i>
But this stranger is a blade buried in each eardrum, and she is on her knees as every single beautiful sound reaches a fever pitch decibel that saws her open. There is blood streaming like plasma from her ears, bright red and beautiful if it were a color that belonged to anything other than this moment. There is blood in her eyes too, and she blinks rapidly at a world tinged crimson and shrinking small around her. She tries to cry out, but he has given her no sound of her own. It was never a gift, never a blessing, she realizes too late. She is crumpled now, her legs crushed beneath her and the sand all stained with her rust. The sound has gone beyond volume, and she can feel it now in her bones as it vibrates to a point of detonation, reaches a tangible pitch that shatters her bones and shreds every blood vessel in her body. She feels like paper, like the wing of a butterfly.
She retreats to a place inside her head where pain turns the dark behind her bleeding eyes the same shade of burning black as the sand beneath her. She might’ve apologized if she had any strength left to do so, any strength left to even pick her head up off the ground where she lay. But there is just nothing inside her now, and even as the sound finally fades there is nothing left inside her heart to feel relief. There is only this new silence, familiar but for the one thing that stays soft in her dying ears. It is the sound of her own shredded heart thumping wetly, slower and slower, and then there is nothing at all but a death she now welcomes readily.
When she opens her eyes again, it is like waking from sleep, and for a moment it is easy to believe that it had been nothing but a dream. But as her quiet eyes focus on the world around her and the details begin to take shape, she feels that deep emptiness swell again in her chest, a cold fist wrapped around her heart. It must be wrapped tight, because she cannot feel it beating inside that cage of bone anymore. She blinks, and part of her just wants to close her eyes again, but she is not foolish enough to think that He is done with her. So she stands, and she finds that she is glad for the way this world is only a few shades of gray, because at least it means she cannot see the stain of bright crimson splashed beneath her body anymore.
Sound is a ghost, but she does know it exists, even if not for her.
And it’s okay, because she’s come to believe maybe she is a ghost, too.
So it feels like a dream when suddenly her mind is filled with something she can barely fathom, with noise that is like melody, sounds all strung together like shining lights and etched at all their edges with a vibration she imagines she can feel in her temples and her cheeks and those violet lips that part in quiet wonder. <i>‘There is something I would ask of you. Meet me at the beach.’</i> She clings to each word like one might cling to a lover, exploring each curve of every syllable before moving on to marvel at the next. She tries to repeat them back, like saying them aloud might forever carve them into her memory, but when she speaks there is no sound. There is nothing at all and the loss is an agony that is entirely new to her. <i>The beach.</i> She thinks, almost feverish with the need to hear more of that voice in her head, more words she understands when she has no right to.
The beach.
It is another thing she knows to exist, but not from personal experience. Her home is among forests made of trees instead of bones, with branches instead of broken ribcages. There are flowers full of butterflies instead of bellies full of rot and festering maggot. But these are not things that seem to hold any kind of weight in her thoughts as she makes her way towards this new true-north her heart clings to so naively, towards the potential for more of the voice that had filled her mind and built a home there like a cuckoo, chasing everything else away. It is her own gratification she thinks of as she follows the river west to the ocean, and then further still. And though she has memorized every word he carved into her mind - every pause and syllable, the exact tone and shape of every word - she has neglected to consider what it is that he might ask of her. In her gentle wonder, she thinks there is nothing she wouldn’t give him in thanks for this gift.
She knows she’s arrived more by smell than anything else - it is a cloying kind of stink that greets her readily, climbing her legs and over her dark skin until it touches the violet points of her delicate face and climbs into her nose to fester. It is the first warning, the first feeling of doubt creeping in as those quiet brown eyes slowly take everything in. There is a crowd gathering together like drops of dew in the belly of a leaf, pulled together by the gravity of a man who isn’t a man at all. Does she even belong here? But then he speaks, and even though the rest of the world is entirely silent, the waves crashing soundlessly and the scavenger birds with beaks hanging open in a noiseless, perpetual shriek, his voice is exactly as she remembers and she is soothed again.
But these words are different than the ones that came before, and even though she finds herself still bashfully enamored with the sound of his voice, with the fact that sound even exists at all, she can also feel the start of unease prickle along her spine. She catches like a burr on the phrase <i>see what things lie beyond the world of death</i>, feeling warmth drain from her body as though someone has filled her with holes. She wants to tell him that she is sorry, that she isn’t made for a task like this. Isn’t strong or clever or brave, isn’t any shade of remarkable. But no one else moves, no one speaks unless they are doing so without moving their lips, and so she is quiet too (as if she has a choice, as if she had any idea how to build words and string them together in this beautiful way that he can). She has already decided she will not go, but her head turns and that gentle gaze wanders along the beach in the direction he tells them, wondering not how one might enter the afterlife, but instead what a buzzing noise might sound like. It is a curiosity that makes her smile in a quiet, secret way.
Or at least it did, until he pauses and looks at them and tells them to die. It is nonsensical and surreal, and she frowns and steps back, uncomfortable but unafraid until the dying begins.
When it is her turn, she is like a doe beneath that gaze of stone, trapped by his immensity and her own insufficiencies. She can hardly stand the way he watches her, like he knows things she does not, like she is a cockroach he’s just found hiding in his home. For a moment nothing happens and she wonders if she’ll be free to leave after all, if he can see that she is not strong or brave or special, that she is no good for this task. She takes a step back, turns, though her quiet eyes have found a gravity in him that feels wholly impossible to sever.
Then she hears it, hears everything in sudden, soft clarity. The wind in her own hair, the wind in his, in the sand and the bones and the wasted bodies she is so earnestly trying not to notice. She can hear the carrion birds and those cawing, shrieking sounds, the ones that must go with those gaping beaks she had noticed earlier. She can hear the ocean and all of its immensity - the distant waves like a whisper, and the nearest ones like a whoosh-shush as they collide with the beach and disappear. It is so beautiful, so painfully perfect that she is finally able to tear her eyes from him so she can turn and look to take it all in. There is such a gentle kind of love in her eyes, such a wistful smile on those pale violet lips. She almost doesn’t notice how the sound is climbing, how the serenity of the world around them is creeping towards storm, and then from storm to inferno as she winces back and away, all wild eyes and pain. The wind is a whistle in her ears, the birds a blade with their screaming so amplified. The ocean has given up whispering for shouting, for a sound that even now continues to change as she backs away mindlessly, the whites of her eyes flashing.
<i>She has known the silence for as long as she has known anything - known the existence of it but not the absence, for how could one miss a stranger they’ve never met.</i>
But this stranger is a blade buried in each eardrum, and she is on her knees as every single beautiful sound reaches a fever pitch decibel that saws her open. There is blood streaming like plasma from her ears, bright red and beautiful if it were a color that belonged to anything other than this moment. There is blood in her eyes too, and she blinks rapidly at a world tinged crimson and shrinking small around her. She tries to cry out, but he has given her no sound of her own. It was never a gift, never a blessing, she realizes too late. She is crumpled now, her legs crushed beneath her and the sand all stained with her rust. The sound has gone beyond volume, and she can feel it now in her bones as it vibrates to a point of detonation, reaches a tangible pitch that shatters her bones and shreds every blood vessel in her body. She feels like paper, like the wing of a butterfly.
She retreats to a place inside her head where pain turns the dark behind her bleeding eyes the same shade of burning black as the sand beneath her. She might’ve apologized if she had any strength left to do so, any strength left to even pick her head up off the ground where she lay. But there is just nothing inside her now, and even as the sound finally fades there is nothing left inside her heart to feel relief. There is only this new silence, familiar but for the one thing that stays soft in her dying ears. It is the sound of her own shredded heart thumping wetly, slower and slower, and then there is nothing at all but a death she now welcomes readily.
When she opens her eyes again, it is like waking from sleep, and for a moment it is easy to believe that it had been nothing but a dream. But as her quiet eyes focus on the world around her and the details begin to take shape, she feels that deep emptiness swell again in her chest, a cold fist wrapped around her heart. It must be wrapped tight, because she cannot feel it beating inside that cage of bone anymore. She blinks, and part of her just wants to close her eyes again, but she is not foolish enough to think that He is done with her. So she stands, and she finds that she is glad for the way this world is only a few shades of gray, because at least it means she cannot see the stain of bright crimson splashed beneath her body anymore.