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After lurking this thread for a while, I have decided that I am In with a
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# ¿ Mar 26, 2015 01:41 |
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 20:40 |
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Don't Touch That Dial - 1197 words James was never alone; at least, it never felt that way. His days, yawning every morning before him like grey expanses, each one undifferentiated and congealed into some sickening mass, were combatted by his application of words. Wherever he went, he made sure to ensconce himself with the protection of language. The news and weather, audiobooks, music playlists accompanied him throughout the day, interrupted only for the necessities of lectures and tutorials, the barest of pleasantries exchanged at fast food counters. James himself strove to say as little as possible in these encounters—talk in real-life was always far more disappointing to him than the hyper-realized stories told to him in his long sojourns from one room to another. He looked forward to the night-time the most. It was, growing up, the place he felt most vulnerable and exposed. It had nothing to do with fear, he told himself. After all, the night-light his parents purchased for him as a child didn’t ameliorate things anything: it just made the shadows in his room sharper, more angular. What bothered James about the dark was the complete absence of language. It was as though with dusk humanity retreated into itself, hiding its aspect from the outside world. Sound gave way to noise in the night, the meaningless rattle of pipes and the wind’s seething. As a boy he would yearn for the discordant holler of a drunk along his street to reassure him that the world was still there. Now, living by himself, he revelled in his nightly ritual of the radio, letting its mutterings lull him into unguarded sleep. When inevitably he awoke in the dead hours of the morning (his alarm clock always displaying some inexplicable ratio—3:08 or 4:29) with the urge to pee, he awoke to a world maintained by language. The immediate feeling that came over him as he jolted into consciousness was embarrassment, as though he had nodded off in the middle of a conversation. But that emotion was just as quickly replaced by the warmth of knowing that he was wholly tertiary to whatever was being spoken or sung. The flow of words continued on even when he wasn’t there to understand them. The world went on, the forecasts and traffic reports and earworm jingles accumulated and spread over his spartan room, galvanizing his existence with this poetic echolalia. He launched himself from sleep one night, the clock reading 2:22—looking to his bleary eyes like some kind of glitch in the digital display—he was greeted by a song softly humming through the speakers. An old song—a golden oldie, his uncle used to call them, always sounding momentarily enraptured by the internal rhyme, as though the phrase transmuted the repetition of “old” into something powerful and virile. The voice on the radio was female, nasally and insistent, demanding adamantly the arrival of mail, the fulfillment only a letter could provide. He had always wondered about this song: if the letter never came, would she sate her desire by swiping her neighbours’ missives, living vicariously through the promises of payments and credits, salutations and family trivia? He rose to his task of pissing, hand-washing, and refilling his emptied cup of water. He would then return to wring a few more hours’ sleep from his pillows. On the way back from his washroom, the song reaching its emotional climax, he felt the that his room was fuller than it had been. His eyes roved the featureless room, landing on his reading chair in the corner. Occupied. A mass piled into the chair, concentrated blackness within the black. James felt cold, and far away. He felt as though he were watching himself fixate on a featureless point in the room. The mass remained in the chair, which creaked obligingly, noise betraying existence. Seconds passed, the woman’s negotiations with the mail replaced by a horn blare from a song he didn’t recognize. “Shhhh,” the mass hissed. James turned around with a calmness that surprised him, and re-entered the washroom. He locked the door, allowed his body to crumple to the floor, and forced his eyes shut, pushed his face as hard into the cold tile as it would go. *** James hadn’t called the police. He hadn’t seen the point. Night operates on a different logic, one that is exploded in the light of day. He shrugged it off, he put it behind him—contorting himself away from the nightmare. He continued his word-smothered days, enchanted to sleep by promises of traffic every hour on the hour, and the promise of another empty day to be filled. This particular night, his dreams failed him: he walked corridors, bumping into vague, undefined faces he felt he knew. He would smile at them, and they back, and then their eyes would get wider and wider, their jaws begin to work as though on the precipice of making some announcement, but forming no words, just opening wider and wider. The halls began to stretch and the roof to rise until everything felt so wide and vast and he spilled forward into his warm room and its canopy of language. It took a moment for his ears to register the commercial’s choked, desperate assurances of low, LOW prices, his brain refusing to translate the words into meaning. The radio babbled on, guaran-TEE-ing James that this offer would not last. Involuntarily, his head rolled to the right, to the chair. The mass sat. James’s hand reached furtively for the lamp on his night stand. “Don’t…” the mass gurgled. James obeyed the raspy command. He froze. “Don’t…wait…” the words spilled from it, thick and unfamiliar, “c…call for yours…today.” *** So it went. It didn`t come every night, which was less of a relief than James had anticipated. The intervals of appearance were random, a code that James couldn’t possibly crack. He would wake in the night to find it in its usual seating, occasionally humming along to a song. Then James, wrenched from a sleep that was a dream of the pure void, found the mass standing at the edge of his bed. The radio offered nothing now but the persistence of static. “James,” the mass, undefinable as ever, darkness-in-the-dark, spoke. Its voice was unsteady, thin and insistent as wind. It dispersed into the static rushing out of the radio, melting into pure white noise. “It’s nice to finally…speak to you, James.” There was a pause. The static pulsed and the room sounded like it was filling with water. “Spent so long under your bed, in your closet, James. So…stuffy, in there.” The boy’s fingers pulled themselves toward the nightstand. He could feel the base of the lamp. “I’ve been with you…for a long time, James. Watched you grow up.” He could feel the metal cord of the lamp’s pull coiled in his hands. “I’m always here. And the words at night, they’re…comforting. I’m learning them, myself. I don’t feel so…scared, anymore.” The hand faltered. Moved away. It hung in the air for the moment, and then fell forward, landing softly beside the radio’s plastic and switching it off. The static vanished, and the room was robbed of any noise. “Hello,” James said.
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2015 02:09 |
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IN.
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# ¿ Mar 30, 2015 18:58 |
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Easter craziness is greater than expected, so I too am going to have to drop out. Will next week!
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2015 22:26 |