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Language:
English
Collections:
Yuletide 2019
Stats:
Published:
2019-12-15
Words:
1,000
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
16
Kudos:
23
Bookmarks:
4
Hits:
193

The Moment Echos

Summary:

Anticipation has a sound of its own.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

Anticipation.

Waiting with held breath they stand poised, ready.

The moment stretches on, like when you were young and you stood on the beach watching as, in the distance, men built a mansion.

They were industrious black bugs on a tinker-toy skeleton of what would be a house rising above the dunes.

Two on the roof were throwing down sheets of plywood and you watched them fall, counting the breaths before the sound reached you, made flat and anticlimactic by the distance.

There’s something in that.

The imagined sizzle of rain against the hot summer pavement.

The trees black and in motion against a heavy gray-green sky, full of promise and something. You can see them through the rain streaked glass, but the air, thick with moisture is a distorting lens, making them seem as far away as memory.

A tingle of knowing moments before the sky flashes a bright, cutting blue line that shreds the sickly yellow around it.

You count the beats before thunder shakes your chest, already waiting for the next flash.

Fireworks in late summer, there’s no reason for them that you know, just flashes of light in a rainless sky.

The distance is enough that the light is all there is, yet you still tense in anticipation of the imagined boom.

A glass bumped on the dinner table.

It teeters on the brink.

All conversation stops as everyone watches.

Will it fall?

Late at night in an empty house you awake abruptly.

You’re alone and listen for the sound of tires in the gravel driveway before remembering that no one’s coming that night.

It’s just you and whatever woke you up.

You can’t be sure, but your ears ring with the recollection of a sound that you don’t know if you heard or not.

It was a song you remembered loving as a child.

Was it from a movie? A television show?

Did your parents make it up?

You can clap your hands to the remembered beat, recall singing along, but not the words.

The tune is gone and all the more poignant for it.

If someone were to hum it, say a single line and the whole thing would come back.

But the song is only yours and the memory of it is mute.

You wait.

All day you waited for them to call you but your phone remains resolutely silent.

No news is good news, you suppose, but just in case you won’t be leaving the house that day.

There are too many places between here and where you might want to go that don’t have reception.

The buzz of the high tension wires that you feel along the back of your neck rather than hear drowns it out.

Late at night, the television is on, but muted. The last minutes of the hour eaten up, the assignment due far too soon.

Electric clocks don’t tick, but is there a faint crackle as the numbers change? If it is it’s drowned out by the cacophony of your own self, suddenly aware.

Ears like shells magnify the whisper of blood in your veins until your head is an ocean.

Swallowing is a rush of sound, a raging torrent.

Each breath is a gale, threatening to blow away the scattered puffs of your thoughts like dandelion clocks.

Holding your breath you will yourself to stillness and wait.

Electricity coursing through your computer and desk lamp twine in a mosquito hum.

In town during the Memorial Day parade, right in front of the high school children in the marching band there would be all of the little children in the scout troops. They’d shuffle and try to keep up, none of them walking in step, their footsteps a constant soft shuffle and then they stop.

The front of the parade with the men in their uniforms is in front of one of the monuments. They stand, rifles ready for the salute.

Most of the little girls cover their ears, as well as some of the boys.

Others lean forward, waiting, ready.

If their troop leaders don’t stop them they’ll all rush forward to try and catch the spent casings from the blanks.

Any second now.

You hold your breath.

Pulling over to the side of the road late at night and stopping for no reason other than to look up.

This time of year the sky is so clear, cold and glass-like.

You can see the stars, far more and brighter than in the summer, as though something was blocking them before and has been removed so that it no longer distorts the view.

It’s the noise that’s gone.

There are no leaves to whisper in the trees.

The birds have long since gone to sleep and the bugs are away to wherever they go in the winter.

Without sound the stars are so bright, so abundant, that when you step out of the car for a better look, the engine clicking and pinging with lingering heat you keep the door open to hold onto.

Otherwise you might fall.

Up into the infinity above.

Away into the clear, still night.

The only clouds are from your breath and everything else is stillness.

The sound of your shoes on the snow, a soft crunch, feels disrespectful and you silently slip back into your car and away into the night.

A blur of motion, an owl flying overhead.

It’s big enough that there should be more to its moving. It’s out early, but that’s because there are rabbits this time of year.

Young and bold and as silent as the owl. They don’t know to flee yet, don’t know to look up for danger.

Silent movement in the air, silent movement in the grass.

It will end with an impact, you know, a soft thud and a cry and then silence again.

But for now it’s just the owl flying and the little rabbits eating.

It’s the anticipation, you realize.

Not the sound, but the instant before it.

Notes:

The moment I saw this piece nominated I hoped that someone would ask for it. Because when you listen, really listen, there's always something.