In a hollow kind of tin-can way, she heard him going in and out like speaker-wire not making its connection. Put her right pointer finger into the canal to protect her kittenish ear. She couldn’t believe he’d be doing this now, after all of that orange drain had eaten away the hammer, anvil and stirrup, just after her six month post hearing test, the seven hour mastoidectomy and the placing of a titanium hearing device. All removed in the first surgery, but one leg of her stapes so that there’d be something sound waves could bounce off from.
No sneezing, or sudden movements and certainly no loud headphones!
But the fresh from John Hopkins surgeon hadn’t mentioned douchebag boyfriends with voluminous rage and it was in that tin-tin slap of his shouted shards hitting metal, that she swerved her Mazda 626 at sixty to the side of the state highway, punched at the steering wheel, letting out the voice of her own inner banshee just before jumping out and running down along the tracks.
Her chest a stretched snare, her tears the watery glockenspiel peels of moments in time where sounds are muffled and a brain tears itself to a half sheet of untouched, white paper, to pull itself away from a thunderous, blind in lightning storm and the staining ink-spill just before, never-again!
The real day, away from sonic-boom was sixty-four-degree sun and the poplar trees round the tracks glowed, shadowed, almost silently scratched in a light breeze.
Photo Credit: Blake Cheek/Unsplash