Sound and Silence

Can you to listen to a sound until it has gone entirely, a motorcycle driving into the night outside your window, or children laughing at a pitch so high it would be enough to split your skull into pieces? They conducted experiments of course, to find the very point at which the sound would disappear, that delicate contour between life and death, an intersection of particular bounds, both finite and mathematically impossible.

We wore out our lungs screaming for them, and at that tiny space between sound and silence, at the very point where our voices failed and our crying was formed only from the expelling of air, we found a moment of serenity and utter abhorrence. Our throats bled from the effort as the scientists fell before us, answers uncovered, leading to further confusion. They did not know where the edge of noise lay, or how to find it, but we were to be used as though we served for some sort of ultimate purpose.

They led us to our beds and cut our wrists as a method of keeping close to the comfortable basis of truth. A blade could break the skin and could cut through that limit between air and blood. Skin was measurable afterall, as was bone and agony. We’d drift gently off to sleep, our veins bleeding into the damp red mattress. They trapped moths in cardboard boxes and we placed our hands over our ears so as not to hear their wings beating against their tiny prisons, a tell-tale heart in the corner of the room.