Talking Hands

When science opened her ears up, opened her brain to the sound, she cried. She cried and then cried more for hearing it. For days she sat in city malls with her eyes closed and lived life in other people’s decibels. She didn’t sleep for weeks, instead sat by busy road sides and listened to the cars go by. Finally hearing that whoosh. That sound of being so close to the slipstream your skin moves.
But one day, he found her in a park with hands over ears. Hands that used to hear for her. Hands that rested on speaker fronts to feel noises pushed into the vibrating silence. She told him in halting syllables, still not used to hearing this voice fall from her lips that she still couldn’t sleep. She told him that her dreams were no longer silent witnesses to her existence. She told him she could find no peace.
“This place,” she whispered, “it’s too loud.”
But no doctor would stop the sound. No one would volunteer to steal this blessing from her. Now this curse. And she couldn’t stop the noise. And her hands found holds on ears once decorative. Hands that shook from hearing for her. And she ran.
There’s a mountain outside a town that sometimes gets left off the map. She lives in a house at the top with him. So high there’s barely an echo. So quiet that the wind in the trees sounds like an orchestra. But for them, in their home-made silence, it’s perfect. And sometimes she still hears with her hands and sings silent songs to the mountains with a dance of her fingertips, but there is no chaos here. Here she has found her peace.