From Winamop.com


A Noise. By DA.



There was a noise.

A small noise.

He listened, unconcerned.
When the others had been here they had made noises all the time. There was rarely a moment’s peace.
Sometimes in the dead of night when they were asleep he would awake to the tiniest squeak or rattle and be afraid.

If they were all asleep, he had reasoned, there should have been silence, but there was a noise, a barely audible noise! What could it have been?

Now he just accepted it.

Now he spent all day alone, hearing just the sounds of his own existence.
He had become used to the creaks and cracks of the building, the wheezes and gurgles of his body. It was just the way it was.
Nothing can move without creating vibrations, vibrations which travel through objects until they meet the air. The air moves in sympathy. This is sound.

If there is no sound it means that nothing is moving,
if nothing is moving then all life has ceased.

Silence is unnatural.

The noise stopped.

His ears strained for the next one, the next sign that he was alive. The background hiss made him feel as if he were inside a velvet-lined coffin, buried six feet deep.
It wouldn’t be long now.

Will there really be silence there or does the movement of the earth shake the eardrums of the dead?

A door creaked and then banged shut.

What relief!

Whether it was the wind, or a cat, or an assassin with a knife clamped between his shining teeth, he didn’t know.

He didn’t care.

He was still alive, and he wasn’t entirely alone.

Not entirely.


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