news article
The Silence of the Skyline
The sun rises pale over eastern skyline. Today is a work day, but not for her.
It’s been two months. You’d think her voice would have come back, but it hasn’t. She spends her days wandering the abandoned buildings of Sack Town.
Only cement and rebar remain, the skeletons of bombed-out before-times. The Citizens cover holes where entire walls used to be with loose woven cloth. It lets the chill through, but no one can see in.
It’s the roof she spends all her time on. Lying on her back, cold seeping through her spine, the world whispers. Do you love me? it whispers, a child’s voice, I want you to love me.
I do love you. Her lips move, her eyes shut.
Oh, you couldn’t, the world breathes. You’ve seen so little of me.
If I could speak, I’d tell you every day.
- - -
Citizen Mother, who bound and stitched her wounds, said she couldn’t speak any longer because she’d run out of words. “For three days you did nothing but ramble,” she’d said, “You asked questions and answered them, you shouted, you whispered, you had conversations with yourself. You used words I didn’t even think you knew.”
- - -
Tell me every day, the world echoes, and is done speaking.
- - -
The Citizen Doctor says a well-aimed kick to the larynx, the voicebox, from an assailant injured it. When she spent three hours in the cold, dirty rain, lost, it went from severe to chronic.
- - -
She wishes her hair was long, like the missionaries’ wives’, who followed their husbands all the way from the Docks. She imagines her hair like theirs, fanning out around her shoulders. But the missionaries’ wives speak evils of proletariats.
- - -
Sometimes it comes back to her, in the night. She screams, but can’t. Feels the same pains in her shoulders, ribs, neck. Hears, “You goddamn pinko, you goddamn red,” shouted in her face over and over until Citizen Mother or Citizen Sister finds her spasming in the corner, and rock her back to sleep with the world singing lullabies in the background.
- - -
Then there was a day where the sky was blue like cornflower or Citizen Sister’s eyes, and she thinks that maybe this time it will last (like the missionaries’ wives say it does at the Docks) but it doesn’t and when winds push in the same overcast clouds she’s seen a million times before, it’s sad. The sky is blue at the Docks, why not here?
The world sighs, The sky is blue everywhere, you just never notice.
- - -
She hasn’t eaten in two days because that’s the rule: if you don’t work, you don’t eat.
Citizen Doctor says she’s fine, but she knows she’s not because her voice won’t come back and everyone looks at her with disapproving eyes.
She’s smart enough to learn to sign, everyone knows it, but she can’t. As long as she refuses, there’s still the chance she’ll learn to speak again and make everything okay.
Two days have become three, then four, then five and she doesn’t work and she doesn’t eat and the world whispers rush…rush… as she wastes away.