It was evident the electric company had nothing to do with it now. Experts from the world’s top research centers were meeting with the world’s leaders, or so the news reported. At some point during the day, someone had drawn up a sign and placed it on the side of the road near my home. It read: THE END IS HERE BEOTCHES!
I became scared.
I had no idea where I’d put my keys.
V
Oh my fucking God! Unbearable!
The sound suddenly soared to such an unearthly high decibel level around noon that small cracks stitched down my window panes. The walls vibrated. I pressed my hands over my earplugs and ground my teeth, sweating and swearing. It was all I could do to maintain rational thought. An hour later the world’s leaders declared a state of emergency. How they had the strength to make decisions was incredible. The news reporters, in some mockery of standing in a soundwave hurricane, winced in pain and shook their heads as they reported, barley getting words out. All flights were stopped, schools were closed and kids were sent home, work ceased, the National Guard rolled in to watch the State House, the nation’s military scattered around D.C., FEMA mobilized in every major city. It did no good; no one could withstand the noise. Everyone was useless. Car accidents were clogging up the roads. Lunatics were firing off guns.
I was sitting at my computer marveling at the terrifying news online, fingers in my ears, teeth clenched as the whine—now a raging siren—raked my mind, when I noticed one of my neighbors in the street fall over.
So loud and so high-pitched was the noise at that point, a thousand fingernails scraping a thousand chalkboards would not have come close to the agonizing frequency it put forth. My hairs stood on end and my eyes watered. I could not focus for too long on any one thing before the screaming siren sent my vision wobbling.
And then, it rose again.
“Jesus Christ,” I shouted as I stumbled to my window, “it’s killing me! Oh, God, make it stop! What’s happening!”
My eardrums shrieked with pain. My temples threatened to tear open. I ran around my house, looking for a way to stop the pain, banging my head on the walls. “God, please!” Outside in the street, pandemonium had set in, and people ran fruitlessly in circles, hands over their ears, teeth grinding. Army trucks sped by, helicopters flew over the horizon.
Peering out my front window, I watched as the people in the street stumbled and fell. Blood burst from their ears, running down their necks and shoulders. I could see them screaming but I could not hear them. In the distance, a car swerved into a tree and its occupant spilled into the road like dirty laundry. He rolled around holding his head, his hands stained bright red. Those who had remained in their homes came running outside, blood spitting from their ears onto the ground, long trails of red forming behind them, turning the street into some bad abstract painting.
My brain felt like it was being stabbed with screwdrivers, the pressure in my head swelling until I thought my eyes would shoot out of the sockets and run down the window pane. Still the sound rose in pitch and intensity.
All of us now. Dogs. Howling. Begging for a reprieve.
“Dear, God!” I pleaded repeatedly, as if a man who had shunned the church eons ago would suddenly get a personalized letter from the Almighty. Of course not; my yelling and wailing went unheard even to me. “Oh my God! Make it stop!”
Outside people writhed on the ground. The sun began to set.
Finally, the window exploded.
And something in my head popped.
I felt hot, sticky liquid running down my fingers. Pulling my hands away from my ears, I saw blood flowing down my wrists and dripping onto the carpet. I grabbed the nearest whiskey bottle and drank until it was empty. At some point I landed face first on the floor. Waves of nausea rolled over me before I finally passed out.
VI
When I woke up, there was no more pain. People were walking in the streets, helping one another up. Everyone’s ears were coated in blood.
I have been scared of many things in life, most notably my own failure. My first novel was well received in the underground market, my second not so much, and the third largely ignored. I had spent many years with writing groups. I read as much classic literature as I could. I disciplined myself to turn out only the most quality narratives I could create. At every turn, the nation instead emptied its pockets for stories that were written for a dollar, not an aesthetic. What was worse, I had thought I could spread my love of the written word to my students, only to be thwarted at every turn by a technological revolution that twisted language into an abomination of inhuman laziness; I wanted to scream the day I graded my first paper written in Leet.
When the world went deaf, I found myself with renewed hope that literature, once again, would take precedent as the most popular form of entertainment. What good was a sitcom or an action film without sound? How interesting was a rock and roll band that couldn’t be heard?
While people ran in the streets, bleeding from their ears, crying and banging pots beside their heads, while society’s dregs slipped in and out of homes and businesses, taking advantage of this new opportunity to move undetected and steal whatever they wanted, and while religious zealots everywhere sacrificed goats and cats to a new angry God that wanted us to suffer eternal silence, I turned back to my stories. For weeks, I ignored the madness outside my window, and wrote all day and all night, some of the best material I have ever produced.
This was all a few months ago.
The world has resumed a sense of normalcy, if you can call the myriad sign language classes at every church, school, and community center normal. The ground’s bloodstains were washed away with weeks of street cleaning. There was a mad dash for televisions that offered closed-captioning, and the latest films are shipped with subtitles. These are priorities.
The nightly news subtitles are garish, accurately transcribing slang and expletives, spelling “ask” with the last two letters reversed. I understand the romantic use of portraying society as it is, but I fear. I fear for a generation growing up reading such nonsense. I fear for the children who will learn this as their language.
I fear we’ve been given a chance to once again embrace true art, true language as the Renaissance poets meant it to be, and we’re snubbing it.
My books and stories still do not sell and I don’t know how to teach sign language because I am still learning it myself. I am going broke. As are many.
I wince at the store, as I buy my whiskey, and see people passing notes to each other, tiny communiqués rife with abbreviations: What u do 2nite? How R U doin? Call L8R. I have made it a game to guess what they are saying, what the real words used to be. Sometimes I figure it out, sometimes I’m baffled. Always I’m annoyed.
As I walk by the park on the way home, I watch the deaf children, those original deaf children, play ball and flash signs to each other. Their hands are graceful and swift, bobbing and flexing with fluidity, each finger a tiny ballerina. I see them roll their eyes at strangers, the newly deaf, who destroy their art form by creating their own, more vulgar, variations of the language. I feel for the children.
Their art is being bastardized.
The source of the sound was never discovered. For all we know, it is louder and shriller than ever before. Not one single human on Earth can hear anymore. But sound still exists. The animals will come if you call them. Just the human race was punished. No one has an answer why. I suspect…because we took advantage of our gift.
I sit at my computer, continuing to write, hoping someone will read this or anything else I’ve labored over, hoping I can revive the art of our written word. As I type I watch the captions on the television scroll by. They are misspelled, full of slang I do not understand, and mixed with numbers and symbols that supposedly make them easier and faster to read by a world of morons.
I have no idea what they’re talking about.
I am in Hell.
THE PINCH
Nicky was walking out of the can
dy store with his best buddies, Greg and Willy, when a little boy with an eyepatch ran up and pinched him on the arm.
“Son of a—” shouted Nicky, rubbing his flesh, jerking away from the strange boy. He watched as the skin on his bicep turned pink before his eyes. “What did you do that for, jerk?”
The little boy, a few years younger than Nicky and his friends, stood alone on the street, his messy hair blowing about like a miniature wheat field. He laughed the way little boys do when they don’t understand they’ve just done something wrong. Probably he had seen it on a cartoon or in a comic book, thought Nicky, and was imitating some character. Greg had a little brother who always did annoying things like that, which was why they never included him in their activities.
Nicky contemplated hitting the boy, at least shoving him, but knew that if his mother heard he was in a fight he’d be in a world of trouble. After all, he wasn’t even supposed to be at the candy store; it was on the main road and he was forbidden to ride his bike past the end of his residential street. If she knew he’d punched some kid on the main road, he’d be grounded for sure. And being grounded during the summer was a real bummer.
The flesh on his arm began to itch, and a bead of blood formed on the wound. For a little kid, thought Nicky, he sure pinches hard.
From the salon next to the candy store a bug-eyed woman appeared and grabbed the little boy’s arm, yanked him away. For some reason Nicky couldn’t decipher, she wouldn’t look the boy in the face as she yelled at him, just kept her eyes on the ground, as if she were scolding his feet. “There you are! How many times do I have to tell you not to wander off! You made Mommy worry!”
“The little brat pinched me,” Nicky said, presenting his arm for her inspection. Behind him, Willy and Greg sucked in their breath, amazed at his impudence.
The woman leered at the three boys, a frown spreading across her face, her head shaking as if it was them that were bothering her son, and yanked the boy down the sidewalk to a parked SUV. She hurriedly strapped him in the backseat and got behind the wheel, glancing sidelong at Nicky’s arm and whispering, “No.” The kind of no not said in annoyance, but said to affirm that what she was seeing was simply not true.
Which meant nothing to Nicky and his buddies.
The boys watched the woman through the SUV’s window as she fumbled the keys in her lap, snatched them up, and jammed them into the ignition. A tear ran down her cheek as the vehicle pulled away from the curb and drove off. In the rear window, the little boy rudely stuck his tongue out, and Nicky could have sworn the boy’s one good eye was red.
Dark red, he thought, like it was filled with blood.
“What the hell was her problem?” Willy asked, shoving a Milk Dud into his mouth.
The SUV turned at the intersection, taking the corner fast enough to make the tires squeal, and was gone.
Nicky looked at his arm once again, saw the wound had swollen to a light purple bump, felt the itchiness intensify. It reminded him of last summer, when he got poison ivy playing in the empty lot at the top of his street where the old gas station had been torn down. Yet this was just a tiny mark, hardly something that should bother him as much as it was. Scratching it, he discovered, only made it worse.
“Did you see his eye patch?” Greg asked.
“Yeah, I wonder what happened,” Willy responded. “You think he only has one eye, like maybe he was born without it?”
“Or maybe he poked it out somehow,” Greg said. “My Mom said that her friend poked her eye out running with scissors. The eye rolled near the dog dish and the dog ate it.”
There was a collective “Eewwww!”
“Aw, that can’t be true,” said Nicky, still rubbing the welt. “She’s just trying to scare you. Like when she told you not to make faces because you’d stay that way, and you were afraid to stick your tongue out when the doctor wanted to check your tonsils.”
“It really happened. I swear!”
“No it didn’t.”
“Yeah it did!”
“Did not!”
“Come on,” Willy said. “Let’s get home before Star Trek starts. It’s the one where Q tires to kill Piccard.”
“Q always tries to kill Piccard,” Greg said, rolling his eyes. “What’s new about that?”
They jumped on their BMX bikes like cowboys mounting stallions, and crossed the main road at the intersection, heading toward Sunders Lane and Nicky’s house. They each made sure to jump the same sidewalk cracks and spit at Ms. Hutchinson’s mailbox--she lived on the corner of Sunders and never gave out Halloween candy. At the vacant lot that used to be the gas station, they jumped the bike ramp they’d made earlier in the day—-a piece of plywood angled up onto a cinderblock.
With each pump of his feet, Nicky felt the bruise on his arm growing larger, hotter, itchier. He scratched it repeatedly as he pedaled, a couple times even taking both hands off the handlebars. Could it be infected? God knew what crud the brat had touched that day. And then he remembered the eye. The one reddish eye. Was it really red, he wondered, or was I seeing things, a trick of sunlight through the window?
They skidded into Nicky’s driveway, gravel spitting into the air, dropped their bikes on the grass and raced to the front door. Together they went to the rumpus room downstairs to watch Star Trek and satisfy their sweettooths before they had to disband for dinner.
Nicky kept rubbing the welt.
***
At dinner, he told his parents he’d been stung by a bee. The mark on his arm was now a full-blown red and purple wound, like a bright strawberry birthmark. If he didn’t know better he’d swear he’d been bitten by some kind of large, venomous bug. When he touched it, it felt soft, like a rotten peach. But the few beads of blood that had formed on top had faded away into a tiny scab.
“Stop itching it,” his mother told him, “and go wash it off before you get it infected.”
“Mom, I don’t feel—” Vomit shot out of his body with such force he pulled a muscle in his neck.
“Jesus, Nicky!” Helping him to the toilet, his mother rubbed his back as he expelled his dinner. When he was done he flushed, closed the lid, and sat on the toilet rubbing his arm.
“You don’t look good, Nicky,” his mother cooed to him. “That thing looks like it might be genuinely infected. You’ve never been allergic to bees before. You’re burning up, though.” As she spoke she inspected the wound, twisting his arm to see it in the light. “It doesn’t look like a bee sting.”
“Mom?”
“Yes, Nickums?” She only called him Nickums when he was sick. It had been his baby nickname.
“I lied. I went to Candy Mountain. That’s where I got the bite. Only it’s not a bite. A stupid boy pinched me.”
“You went to the store? Dammit, Nicky—”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“How many times have I told you—”
“I know, but I had that five bucks from Nana...and anyway a boy with an eyepatch…”
His mother gave him a look that said she’d discuss his punishment later, but that right now she was too concerned about his arm. “Don’t know any boys with eyepatches,” she said. “But if I ever see him I’m gonna give both him and his mother a lecture on hygiene. You probably got yourself an infection from his dirty hands.
“Well, swab it with Peroxide and hop in bed and we’ll see if it’s any better in the morning. I’ll call the doctor when I wake up and see if he can squeeze you in. I hope you realize I have to take time out of work now because you disobeyed my wishes. You may have the summer off but I have to work. I have to make money so you can have all the nice things you want, like bikes to break my rules with.”
Nicky hung his head. The nausea had passed, but his arm still burned and itched, and on top of that, he felt guilty for disrespecting his mother. “I’m sorry,” he said.
He shuffled out of the bathroom, instinctively picking at the scab on the wound.
“Don’t pick it,” his mother shouted. �
�That’ll only make it worse. Get in bed and don’t pick it.”
***
Nicky lay in bed, a cold compress on his arm that his mother had given him after cleaning up the bathroom. Staring at the ceiling, he thought about the boy with the eyepatch, saw his face in the granulations of paint. Dirt marred the boy’s forehead and cheeks like leopard spots, some type of sticky juice or candy was crusted at the corners of his mouth, he wore a shirt with a Pokemon character on it, light blue shorts stained with what looked like grape jelly, and green Velcro sneakers. The eyepatch was not a toy; it was made of heavy leather and had a curved inner edge to fit around the boy’s nose, clearly made by medical professionals.
As Nicky stared at the illusion above him, he remembered the force of the pinch, stronger than a boy that age should be able to muster. Pain had been instantaneous, like someone burning him with a match. The tiny fingernails had clipped the skin, drawing blood before Nicky even had time to react. Fast and hard and sharp.
And the boy’s mother…had she been leering at him because she thought he was bothering her boy? Or was it something more? The more Nicky thought about it, the more it seemed she’d been afraid. But why? Did she know what her son had done? Was she ashamed? Why hadn’t she just spanked the brat, or at least scolded him?
Sleep came like a rainstorm, lightly at first, but soon powerful and overwhelming. But dreams of firecrackers and new bikes were constantly interrupted by vignettes of the boy with the eyepatch: the boy’s one good eye pulsing red, lobster-claw hands that snipped at his sides and back, sending bits of flesh to the ground like confetti. In the dream, Nicky wrestled with the boy, rolling in ribbons of his own skin, until finally he punched the boy in the stomach and sat on top of him.
Scraps & Chum Page 3