The Listener

I’m not entirely satisfied with this one. For one, I feel like I tried to cram too much story into too short a form (this is what I get for spoiling myself with a longer story last month). Also, despite the ominous beginning it’s not intended to be a horror story, but I don’t know that it ever recovers from the initial horrific situation.

When he finally stopped screaming for help, when the footsteps were silenced and the echo of the cell door clanging shut had faded, he realized there was something in the cell beside him. He turned to face it, pressing his back against the wall, peering through the darkness. Sunspots swam before his eyes and he was completely blinded in the dark. “What are you? Who are you?” He said. “Say something!”

The thing was standing there in the dark, watching him. And then it walked away. It took a moment for his brain to register the lack of sound.

It wasn’t chained.

Whoever it was did not come back into view. It had vanished in the darkness. After standing until he ached all over and was shivering from both fear and cold, he finally retreated to the wall and sank down into a crouch. It was hopeless to try and fight anyway. “I don’t care.” He told the darkness. “My life is over. Wasted. Do what you want.”

The days passed in darkness. Sometimes he saw his cellmate, always at a distance. He supposed it was good that it never threatened to approach. But it also never spoke and it never came close enough for him to see it.

He began to hate it. His chain rubbed sores around his ankle and it walked around free. When they were fed, he wolfed down his food, but his cellmate took his and withdrew to eat it silently. Every time he would watch this performance with a dull, burning dislike for the creature that hadn’t somehow been reduced to behaving like a starved animal.

But the worst moments were when he felt most alone, when he began muttering to himself just to heard a human voice, even his own, and the silent person came just close enough that he knew it was there, but could not see it clearly. It would crouch down—threatening him, he thought, creeping up on him.

Usually he would jump up and scream at it, making it scuttle away to its darkest corner. But one day as he sat on the floor, feeling the grime of the cold cement under his palms, worn and exhausted from weeping and dreaming of the faces he had left behind, he became aware of the presence next to him, breathing.

“Why won’t you leave me alone?” He hissed into the darkness.

No answer.

“Is it because I’m so useless and weak you like to gloat? Is that it? Do you want to know why I’m here? How nothing I did matters anymore?”

There was a shuffling sound as the figure, barely visible in the darkness, sat down, facing him, and waited.

He stared at the unseen person across from him and a new idea about his cellmate’s behavior occurred to him. So, voice hoarse, stammering in uncertainty under this new idea, he ventured: “It—it was an old lady. She was our neighbor, and—and well I tried to keep them from taking away her house…and it didn’t work and that’s why I’m in here.”

There was no answer. He squinted, willing his eyes to penetrate the darkness, to see this person’s face. But he could see nothing but an attitude of listening. And that, somehow, was a relief.

So he spoke. He told her about his wife and his three children, about the house they’d bought in town and how their first summer there they made a backyard garden like they’d always dreamed of when they lived in an apartment. The zucchini plants had done so well they nearly overran the entire garden, and for an entire summer his wife baked zucchini bread and they had zucchini sauted, baked and fried.

Whoever it was said nothing. But he could almost feel the warmth of another person through the bars.

He turned his gaze past his family and talked about his neighbor. A wizened woman in a tiny rented house beside his own with a balding Scottie and a fondness for zucchini bread. He had barely registered her friendship with his wife until she came to them on afternoon, in tears, because of an eviction notice for overdue rent. His expectation was to find financial records disordered by dementia and old age, only to find her records neat and every cent accounted for.

So he’d gone digging, investigating how six months of rent could just vanish. And what he found was more people, angry. upset, unheard, being pushed out of their homes. Which meant, he discovered, that low income residents of all types and shapes and sizes were being summarily pushed out of their town. He had been so angry, he said, his voice shaking, he didn’t sleep well for weeks.

The listener said nothing.

Fired by indignation, he had traced missed payments, discovered fraud, found the names of the people in charge of removing low-income residents in the hopes of gentrifying their rental properties. But most of the ones targeted were alone, barely surviving as it was. They didn’t have family. Nobody cared if they lost their houses. And the people quietly removing them from their homes had financial and legal backing from the most powerful people in the city.

The listener said nothing.

When he began advocating for those elderly people, he was met with blank stares and shut doors. The news station refused to report on the issue. The mayor blandly gave him a runaround about improving the safety and quality of life in the city’s neighborhoods. He bought ad time on TV; wrote letters to the newspaper, walked door to door telling people. But it wasn’t until he hired a lawyer that the hidden defrauders became truly angry.

The listener said nothing.

So, he said, they came up with a way to shut him up. He spoke of the pounding on the door in the middle of the night, his wife’s terrified face, his children’s screams. The door slamming shut between them, the grim frowns on the faces of the men who dragged him away. The long, dry days in the courtroom, where they produced lie after lie destroying his character, ruining his reputation. He remembered the look on his wife’s face when they pronounced his sentence, remembered the long, horrible walk down here, down to where they left madmen.

For a long time after that, neither of them said anything.

“I couldn’t be quiet.” He said.

The listener said nothing.

But a question seemed to hang between them. He answered it. “I would do it again.” He said, “If I knew for certain that this is where I would end up, I don’t know if I would be brave enough. But…if they set me free, I would do the same thing all over again.

And the listener didn’t need to say anything, because sometimes what is needed is simply to be heard.

#healing #injustice