Hope you enjoy reading this, have yourself a lovely day, and see you Wednesday for (hopefully) something new that I've written!
The Quiet by Mac Clevinger, March 24, 2016
It’s been quiet for so long. The noise, the rumbling, the gunfire, the screams; all of it was gone, replaced with… nothing. Not even a tremor, or the sound of the rubble shifting from someone walking across it. They were gone, the fight was over. I should be glad; I’d wanted the violence to stop, had been willing to kill for it, and now it was over. They had left, or were dead, or something, it didn’t matter. We were safe again, for now. I’d wanted it to be quiet, like it had been before they had shown up here, forced us out of our home and taken it over, but… I can’t stand it. The silence, the nothing, there should be something, someone, somewhere doing anything at all, but they were dead.
I’d wanted them dead, to leave us alone. Why did they have to bring their fight here? We weren’t a part of their struggle, we weren’t soldiers, we were just… are. We are just normal people. Civilians, they’d called us before ordering us away at gunpoint. We owned that house, we’d lived there all our years, and then it was gone and gone again. Why was it so quiet? I thought… I thought when there was nothing, things would be normal again, but the other sounds, the normal ones; they were gone to. Thrown away and replaced with the silence. The birds, the wind in the trees, distant voices talking amiably instead of threatening us to move out of the way. We thought we were safe here, far from the fighting, but…
I was a father. Two children, a wife; all I needed to make it through the last few years of escalating conflicts. The war had always been far away, never directly affecting us; it didn’t matter that things started to get worse for us, we had each other, and nothing got into our little world. When the door was closed, and the news was off, life was whole, complete. The violence never left my wife and I, we knew it was out there, but the children, they didn’t know. Couldn’t understand yet. When we were together, though, secluded from the wider world; when it was just us, that innocence found its way into all of us, and we believed things were alright. For us, at least. We were going to be fine; we were far away from the fighting, it would never… it would never come here, and we could leave before it did.
We didn’t leave, though. No one did; whatever the news said, we never saw it. Sure, the trucks began to appear, and we saw soldiers in the distance, but… and, yeah, there were the checkpoints, but… and the next town over was attacked, but they… they would never attack here, right? All the men with guns, surely they wouldn’t come here, right? We didn’t have to leave our home, we could just avoid being out after dark, keep the kids home, lock the doors and close the blinds. We had men with guns, too; who would come here and attack us? The war was winding down, it had to be. We’d be safe if we just waited it out, things would be normal again, right?
The rubble was still smoking, dust and debris thrown around, and it was still… silent. It was too quiet, the soundlessness of an empty void, not of a town free of conflict that I had wanted. I had wanted so much, but like a fool I hadn’t thought I could lose it. I’d wanted to grow old together, renovate the house one day, retire and enjoy the family home; what everyone wanted. What she’d wanted, too. The house was gone, though. We’d lost it the moment the front door was kicked in and we were told to evacuate. The moment we were shoved onto the street and the door was shut in our faces as glass tinkled from our bedroom onto the street.
The noise and the violence; the loss and destruction of our home for the first time… They were supposed to be on our side, defending us and helping us, but they were the first ones to destroy our lives. What were we supposed to do, though? Run? Where? Why? There’d been peace in that home, normal life continuing on despite the rationing and patrols. That was our life, and it hadn’t been taken from us by the enemy, or by the scavengers the army had begun to hang in the market for profiting off of the war; it was our side that kicked us out into the unknown, disrupted the peace, invaded what I had once thought to be the quiet I enjoyed so much with their yelling and destruction of our home… The first time we lost it. I don’t know what they’d been planning, maybe using it to shoot people from. It doesn’t matter what they’d planned anymore.
I wish I could speak. Could do anything besides stare at the wreckage, numb. I wish I could break the silence that had fallen over me, had fallen over my home. Replace that empty quiet with anything else, but what would even be the point if I could? It wouldn’t change what had happened. It wouldn’t erase the memories of our blank looks, our uncertainty when left on the street to find our way to safety. It wouldn’t erase our fear when we heard the rumbling and the explosions, when we froze as the sounds of violence grew all around us. The quiet… it wasn’t life, but it wasn’t death, either. It was undecided, an unknown that could become anything. The silence could become life, or it could turn into death; the sound of someone alive or another explosion to finish me. It could be anything, still. I didn’t want to break it first, admit that there wasn’t anything out there. I still hoped, like a fool.
There couldn’t be anything, though. There shouldn’t even be me, here, resting against a pile of rubble and waiting for the quiet to end. The noise had been so loud, had scared us so much as the world flew apart around us… We’d tried to hide, wait for things to calm down, but it only got louder and more violent around us. She was scared, my children were frightened, and I didn’t know what to do besides pray that no one found us hiding behind our home. They didn’t have to find us, though. I don’t know if there was anything we could’ve done in the seconds before the blast, but I should’ve done it. Whatever it was, I should’ve done it for us all. I just waited, the hushed silence moments before the world filled with sound and light spent in prayer; that it was over. That we were safe, because it was quiet again.
The world shouldn’t be this quiet. The world should be alive, have people in it doing things, saying things, living… Not this void, this mockery of the people who had once stood beside us in life. I hated it, but I still couldn’t bring myself to break it. To move. To be the only one left. To know that if I stopped, held my breath, and just listened, the silence would find me. To know that anything I did hear wouldn’t be the laughter or whispered words of love that had been stolen from me by the quiet, but a new kind of sound that could only ever fall on ears deaf to whatever joy or sense of normality that I could once have found in it. I had lost everything to the cloying quiet, the pervading emptiness that surrounded me and reminded me of what I had once had and now lost.
She was gone, thrown by the blast like the rest of us and buried. I don’t even know how long ago, at what time my love was taken from me; all I know is that I woke up, numb, to the empty quiet, unable or unwilling to move and disturb the scene that surrounded me. I couldn’t see her now; could barely see the uniforms beneath the dust of the men who’d forced us onto the street, more concerned with fighting the enemy than defending us. The ‘civilians.’ We weren’t soldiers, didn’t have guns, so we were unimportant to them. I guess we’re all unimportant to the silence that falls over us, a funeral shroud on the end of our lives to remind those of us left that the same fate awaits us all, uncaring for the work we do in covering up the quiet in one another’s lives.
The soldiers on our side, the ones on the other side; what did it matter what color they wore? They brought the silence here, together, and in concert stripped away the layers we had built to keep the quiet away from our lives. The only one they’d failed in removing entirely was mine, but I still couldn’t do it. Maybe I could never do it. Maybe my fate is to lie here, surrounded by the remnants of the life I’d known until I, too, became a part of the quiet for someone else to come across. Maybe it’d for the best; what did I have left? Not my wife. My children? How could they… they…
My arm twitched, the veins lighting up with a growing heat that spread throughout my body, urging me to lift my head and part dried, cracked lips. The quiet surrounded me, suppressed me, was an unknown that scared me in its uncertainty. It had replaced the old calm, the peaceful sounds, its arrival heralded by a force of such violence that the old normality could never remain as it had once, but within that silence there was still a question, one that wasn’t answered by wasting away in remorse. My wife was undoubtedly… she was dead. But my children? All around me, the silence pushed down on me, trying to drive the fire out of my veins and send me back to despair, but I refused to allow it to stop me. I didn’t see them. They could still… they could still be out there. Waiting. Scared. Alone. Suffering the same silence that I had been subjected to.
Without a sound I rose to my feet, body stiff and sore from being thrown around and lying still while unconscious. I scanned around the wreckage of my home, breathing deeply to feed the fire burning within that fought against the quiet. I didn’t see them. That could mean one of two things, but I knew without a doubt they weren’t dead. They couldn’t be. I had to find them, had to protect them and get us out of here; had to save us all from the quiet that wanted to take us slowly into that dark and inescapable place. I breathed in, long and deep, ignoring the feeling of specks of dust against my dry throat, and I let the breath out in a loud, determined shout that shattered the silence I’d been trapped in, freed me of the quiet, and would reunite me with my children.
“Fadil! Amira!” They were out there, and I was going to find them.