He can’t quite remember the exact moment or details of when he initially came into existence; just swirls of blackness against a film of hazy white; a sudden explosion of red and orange; and a spark of being was infused into previous lifelessness.
“It was diaphanous, dreamlike, a ghost-thing, the color of smoke, and it welled up like silk under water…”
***
They live in a world without sound. His mother twists and angles her hands and fingers, the language of the silent blurred with pale skin and red nails. Patrick doesn’t respond or watch, just plays out a rhythm on the table. She stops midsentence, instead snatching out a hand to silence his, lips pursed and eyes pleading. Patrick knows, understands that any unnecessary noise is dangerous. He knows that the police have equipment, mechanical ears trained for the slightest noise above the scuffling of feet on the floor, or the sound of running water. Outside, even the birds are silent- if you ever caught one you’d notice the blind shining stare of their eyes, and the clicking of metal wings trying to move. You’d notice the battery pack on their undersides, and would be able to feel the wires underneath false feathers.
The last time Patrick saw a real bird was the same year he last heard the sound of his mother singing. They banned music before anything else.
He understands all of this, but it doesn’t stop him from questioning why. When his mother pulls her hand away, his stay limp on the table and he remains silent. He wonders if his voice even works, anymore.
***
That same night, the house next door is raided. It’s a family of four, a mother, father, six-year-old girl and a newborn boy. The little girl had accidentally stepped on her baby brother’s hand, and the scream woke up the entire block. From his bedroom window, Patrick sees the man and woman handcuffed and being dragged towards the police cars, the young girl pulled towards a separate one. She’s screaming noiselessly, without a voice from growing up in a world without a sound. The mother is clutching a blanketed bundle to her chest, and when she trips it tumbles to the ground, lifeless. In the handcuffs, her fingers twist uselessly, but Patrick can understand them enough. ‘I tried to make him stop, but he wouldn’t be quiet, he wouldn’t stop screaming, I tried…’
He barely makes it to the bathroom before he gets sick, and that night he dreams of a little baby with little hands and little fingers, too small to speak, his mouth stretched wide but his eyes blank and blind like the pretend-birds flitting noiselessly through the sky.
***
The year before all the words were stolen and outlawed, his mom used to sing him a lullaby about honeybees and peacock feathers and Ferris wheels. She’d rub her thumb gently over his wrist, and Patrick would play music notes beneath his closed eyelids. Sometimes even now he can see them in the just between phase of sleep and wakefulness, but instead of his mom singing he can just hear her in the next room over, lying the bed she used to share with his father, crying just as quietly as she can.
He wishes, just a little, that he didn’t have to hear the silence of the world. The small, hurt, and cautious noises are just as painful as the lack of anything else.
***
He sleeps through the softly bombing summer nights, steel monsters setting the sky on fire and demolishing the world beneath them. When he wakes, he finds himself surprised to see a sun. And life goes on. Very small. Deathly still.
***
