Silence
Content Warning: images of bodily harm
There’s a clock on the wall. A big, black-rimmed clock, like something that should be in a station. A large, airy station, bustling and bright. People talking and jostling, smiling or rushing past. A nexus, a world connected to worlds, with life and energy. As twilight moves in, lamps light up and the flow continues, a constantly beating heart of a city of a million souls.
In the dark room, I watch the hands of the clock as they crawl forward awkwardly. They look like legs of maimed insects on a bathroom floor, twitching in their death throes. I sit, and the clock moves.
The clock moves, and I sit and contemplate it. Now is just a moment, and the past is long, and the future is endless.
Opposite the clock is a window. I sit and watch the clock as it moves.
Outside the window is now. I can’t hear what is happening. I can’t see out of the window. I sit, and watch how the clock moves.
Someday this will just be something that happened, a teacher’s red circles in a student’s notes. We pin it neatly in a textbook so we can see the facts, just the facts, written down in black and white, a thousand former nows captured in a row. Because the past is long, and the future is endless.
The things I cannot hear from the window grow louder.
Sounds are so specific and so ambiguous. The sharp crack of a twig snapping. The dull grinding of an ailing tractor engine. From far enough away, voices could be saying anything.
Next to me is a table.
Some sounds are so loud that they are like silence, expanded. Too loud to be ignored, but so loud as to almost be inaudible.
On the table is a needle.
The past is told in numbers. How long since. What date it was. How many were shot.
On the table there is thread next to the needle.
Block quotes in boxes, fenced off from the text, related but not the same. I was there. I saw. I heard. I knew. I said. I remember.
I pick up the thread, and the needle, feel their coolness in my hands. I Pull the thread through the needle, feeling its coarseness. Wrap it around my fingers, feel the lines make soft indentations in the flesh.
There is a clock, and there is a window.
I put the needle to my face, push it through the flesh above my mouth. Human skin is tough. I feel the pressure, and finally a sharp pop, the needle grazing my gums as it passes through. I take up the needle again from inside my mouth, slick now with mucus and with blood. Pull it down past my teeth, feel the thick thread, almost wire-like, drag through its hole. Hold my lip awkwardly and push the needle through again.
I sit like this, with the window there, and the insects dancing, and push and pull, feeling the sharpness of the needle and the dullness of the thread, making a ragdoll line across my face. Reach the end. Knot thread tight, let needle drop.
The window is still there, accusing with its emptiness. And I cannot look, and I cannot hear. And I cannot speak.
No moving quotes. No recitation of dates. No angry denunciations. No words of sympathy. No cries for help. No pleas for forgiveness.
For the past is long and the future is endless. But not, in the end, for everyone.
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About the Author
Clare Griffin (she/her) is a historian of early modern science, mental health advocate, and fiction author specialising in pieces on the neurodivergent experience. She works as Assistant Professor of Russian History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She lives with OCD and a bipolar spectrum disorder. Visit her website online at: www.claregriffin.org