The Sounds

One day, the woman stretched out her face and let the sounds in. She had never liked them. Sounds were impatient, sounds were invasive, they wanted to crawl into her ears and camp there. She had spent years of her life trying to block them out: with blutak and hats, with BOSE noise-cancelling headphones, with silent rooms and pure digital interactions. But the neighbour would practice his saxophone, smearing notes across her face with a disgusting mustard stickiness, and the kakas would fly past her house with terrible rusty cries, and the southerly storms would send waves up onto the rocks in terrible liquid exhalations that she felt were trying to suck her insides out through her pores. She tried to wrap herself in silence like a soft mohair blanket and live contentedly in next Wednesday, where there was no sound at all. But the silence was hungry, it was ravenous. She started falling through it, and realised that had no bottom, it would just yawn and yawn and try to swallow her whole. There she was in the middle of it, the hole at the bottom of the whirlpool, a dark void of absence. It was a vacuum, it would suck her brain out through her ears, it would turn her inside out. There was nothing for it. So she stretched out her face and let the sounds in. 

They had been waiting, so there were many. Chirrups and whoops and smears of sound, engine brakes and sparrow wings, the wind among the rustling clouds, men yelling fuck off cunt at each other and the steel plates over the holes in the road going clangCLANG every time a wheel went over. They washed over her, going straight through her and around her and up her nostrils and inside her molars. Her jaw unclenched, and her bones breathed a sigh of relief and shuffled a little further away from one another.