Hush
Silence is what haunted my mother. She was used to the scrape of my father’s boots down the hallway, the sound of his truck’s bald tires skidding on our gravel driveway, the slamming of doors he walked through. She was even used to the way all his words melted into one another when he’d had too much to drink and you had to run his speech through a strainer to sort out all the words.
She had her ears tuned so that she could hear whimpers coming from my brother, straight across the house, through every closed door and sheetrock wall slathered in coats of drippy paint and cheap photocopied prints. All his little giggles were her birdsong, his uneven steps were her pulse.
So when they left her ears went blind. They no longer heard our dishwasher go off, or the bath overflowing, she wandered through a fog of “Sorry,-what-was-that?“s and “Hmmm?“s. So eventually I stopped, her footsteps never made a noise going down the stairs, so I made mine follow suit. Her clothes never rustled, so I pinned mine down. Her bed never creaked when she rolled over from sleepless night into sunless day, so I stopped moving.
Our house filled up with silence, it drowned out all other noises. It pressed down on my eardrums until they burst in school hallways when hundreds of kids ambled through my ear canals, littering their laughter like aluminum cans.
From all this silence, we lost our voices. We were hollowed out and drained by the hush they’d left, our words, though not often spoken were given reverence, if only for their rarity. For us, those words were small memorials, a tribute to the silence they’d left, and a hope to break it.
