Murmurations
A story about sound.
I had started dreaming without sound.
Both in dreams and in waking life, voices and music had been reduced to a heady, murky thing where understanding should be. Up on the highline, home of whistles and birdsong, now resided a singular, screaming, banshee tone. It sucked in the real sounds, ate each part and regurgitated them as something that had no meaning.
In my dreams, things still had the idea of sound. If I was talking with someone I had a feeling of being part of a conversation, almost like a muscle memory filling in the gaps.
One dream had me at my desk at work, with my fingers tapping on the keys and with each hit a new digit appeared between the others. I could feel the sound. I could fill in what I knew a keyboard sounded like as my nails hit the hard plastic keys, but even after growing thousands of new fingers on each hand had pulled screams from my chest, I was struck with the utter, pin-drop silence of my dreamscape.
That silence meant that sounds in the waking world felt like a punch in the face. Opening my eyes into the inky darkness of my room, I lifted my hands up to check that only my ten familiar fingers were there. I counted the silver rings, all six of them accounted for, exactly where they should be. I pulled the ring from my right thumb and began clicking the spiralled ends over one another, an annoying habit I had picked up whenever I felt uneasy.
Click. Breathe in. Click. Breathe out.
Next to me, my partner shifted in the sheets, his snores breaking the silence so violently that I screamed and reached to turn on my bedside light. His arm batted me away and he rolled towards the wall, face scrunched up at the sudden brightness of my lamp.
“Sorry, sorry,” I whispered, rubbing a heavy hand over my face, “I’ll go to the other room”.
He didn’t reply, just grumbled something before falling back asleep with deep, heavy breaths. In the calm of our room, they sounded too loud, and dangerous, like the shifting of sand in an hourglass. I lingered by the door a little, waiting until they levelled out enough for my beloved near-silence to return.
The other room was cool, colder than it should have been for the time of year and so I grabbed a jumper from the floor and pulled it on before setting down the duvet and my pillows. I knocked the side of the bed as I walked past, the thump of it both too loud, and too dull in my ears. Outside a car drove by, the headlights arching over the wall and casting my silhouette as a solid thing, close enough to touch. I watched her stretch and shrink and then vanish as the crunching of gravel under the tyres quieted.
Sleep found me quickly in the quiet calm. This time there were no dreams, just an endless, yet gentle nothingness. No sound to startle me. No quiet to be broken.
Awareness filtered back in slowly as the morning sun pushed tentative fingers through the gaps in the blinds. I could barely hear the birds chirping outside, no doubt perched on the tree that they liked to hide in. Behind the door, I could almost hear him walking around, feet heavy on the uneven boards with another muffled sound coming and going as he wandered. The sound was too quiet for me to place. Even with my eyes closed, concentrating on nothing but the mumbling of it, I wasn’t able to fill it in. It’s not something that you really even think about until you can no longer hear the normal, soft tones of things vibrating around you. Now, whenever there’s a sound just a little too low, or too many sounds piled on top of one another, there is nothing there, just a strange murmuration of sorts unlike anything I’ve heard before.
He opened the door, all messy hair and bright eyes, toothbrush between his teeth.
“Morning, what made you come through here?”
“Do you not remember?” I asked, pushing back the covers. The room was warm now. I could hear the loud banging of pipes above my head flowing out from the boiler. The droning of it made it harder to hear his reply as he walked off to rinse his mouth.
“What?”
He huffed and came back into the room. “No, was I snoring?”
I reached out to him, ran a hand up his arm and pulled him to sit on the edge of the bed. He placed a kiss on my forehead, his thumb rubbing slowly back and forth behind my ear.
“No, had a nightmare”
“So why not stay?”
“Because when I turned on the light you looked like you were going to murder me”. He laughed a little, creases forming in the corners of his eyes.
“You should have just woken me up. Did you sleep okay through here?”
I nodded, fed up with the reminder of the night. Dreaming wasn’t a regular thing for me, never had been, and I grew frustrated whenever a dream was unpleasant, furious when it was as horrifying as the night before.
I had always felt cheated by my lack of dreaming, and now that I was one sense down they felt even more scarce. They were film-like, something I watched rather than a part I played. He could sense my mood souring and pulled me in a little tighter to his chest, lips pressed against my hair, his hand covering my ear so that all I could hear was the satisfying beating of his heart. Strong and steady. A sound that could never be lost to me, no matter how little else I could hear.
I dreamt again the next night.
A turmultous thing, all cresting waves and flashes of lightening, made yet more frightening by their lack of sound. Thunder was a warning that never came, no reminder to brace for the strike. The roaring of waves absent, leaving me clinging to the bow with a sinking dread as I waited for each one to flood the deck. The ship tilted, bodies of unknown things flung overboard or smashed against masts seemingly randomly. I watched as the sea claimed them, my hands reaching out too slowly to catch them.
Another wave crested, as tall and towering as the lower sails, tearing one from its lines. I watched it flutter, caught and twisting in the loose ropes and pulleys swinging wildy in the winds. The ship lurched again and my balance failed. I slid along the deck, the feeling of silent screams tearing at my throat as I hit the far railing. As I stared over the edge to the pitch black abyss below, breath quick and strangled, a pattern slowly emerged. The beating of the waves now had a regularity to it, one that, while silent, could be felt against the ship. Above, deep in the storm grey sky, the lightening too began to assimilate.
The silence gave way to a low, murmuring beat. A steady and predictable pull that coralled the wind, waves and chaos into something understandable. I leaned into it, waiting until the wave ebbed and the ship righted before I stood up. It was enough to let me make my way across the deck, to climb the stairs and stare out into the sun rising on the horizon. I waited as the waves grew, still, rising above the remaining sail no longer afraid as I waited for it to crash over me.
The moment it hit I woke gently in darkness, my head resting on his chest with his hand over my ear. I could hear nothing but the beating of his heart and the murmured words of comfort he whispered into the air.
Thank you, Dear Reader.
-R
Cover thumbnail Photo by George Shervashidze
Rebecca Morris 2024©, All Rights Reserved.