and sharp. Taking a breath was like blowing on a raw wound. It branded my chest from the inside out.
This surely did not bode well for my singing.
A meadowlark chirruped in the twilit obscurity, flitting through on retreating wings. The grass rustled slightly with its unseen passing, but then I was left with the pressure to fill the quiet. I measured my breathing, wrestling with the fetal-crimped demon in my chest. My voice was a dormant thing inside me, unsure of being harnessed, if the season was right. It did not feel ripe.
I swallowed, working it up inside me, composing my vocal chords and bracing them against the obstruction in my throat. Then I took a breath, and forced sound to disperse.
That first note rang out, a tribute to my effort. It rang timid but sweet, an effective lance to the chilled air. Instead of being swallowed by the mist, it echoed – a sweeping, warped wave across the land. I heard the faint sound of the meadowlark mimicking it in the distance, a chirping response to the charm in the music.
Then it failed me.
My voice scratched at its cage to be free, but the door had swung shut, and there was no key on this present earth. The sound faltered – filtered determinedly through the cage bars, but weakened alarmingly as I pressed it. It was retreating quickly to its wintry lair, weary, resigning without an ounce of respect for the distress it would cause in its absence. It betrayed me, there in the open, abandoning me to the fate of defenseless silence.
I choked slightly on my efforts, as they razed my damaged throat, crumbled, and clogged my throat like ashes. It was raw from the stress, and I clamped my mouth shut abruptly to halt a rising fit of coughing.
And with the sealing of my lips, I felt it: the weight of the silence.
It was thick as blood around me.
The faintest glimmer had come to the weedflowers, like a blush, but it faded as quickly as it had come, until only a scant few buds cast the weakest light.
My nerves prickled but fizzled out then with a strange knowing, and I became utterly centered there in that field, aware of the deafening quiet in every hair on my body. It rang across the land as surely as my voice had, a velvet hush, roaring in the numbness of my ears, its whispers registering in the goosebumps on my flesh.
As I stood there, twilight sunk visibly into the brush.
The next swallow I took was dry as parchment.
My fingers curled around the strands of grass at their tips, holding its hand – a pitiful gesture.
I waited, my eyes shifting, wondering at the idle seconds. I felt my insides shrivel up in an exodus, vacating the scene. They left me there, a sacrifice for their comfort.
The conviction of my failure was a smell in the air. My vulnerability struck me like the keenest of warnings. In its absolute state, it was all I needed in order to know.
My failure was a sentence.
It was as if a veil fell away from me with the failing of my voice. It was much the same as the feeling one might suffer at center stage if they had been singing for the audience only behind the cover of the curtain – sheltering, perhaps, the secret of a tender age, or inferior class, when the audience expected a woman of stature – and then the curtain fell away, and all was revealed in a terrible moment of truth.
The silence would be deafening.
Then they would crucify me for the scandal.
The only difference now was that I could not see my audience. The brush hid them. I did not know where they were, but I knew they were out there.
And I could be sure they knew of me too.
I stood my ground as the lights went out around me, resigned. My breathing matched the quiet, drawn in on dragging, silent wings, trying to make way for the subtle, telltale sounds that might pinpoint the company that shared that field.
It was folly to stand in the silence, in an open field, as darkness fell. It was folly to stand in any of those things. I knew as much. I told myself that, as if I required telling.
But I stood in my folly. It swirled about my ankles. It breathed down my neck.
The grass hissed, but I could not tell if it was from movement or a breeze. I felt