by T. Wyse
"And it'll be nice to have a receptive audience, for once." Collette added.
"My name, my full name, is Collette Avery. I have only been on this planet for ten years, and yet I am not quite what you would expect."
"I was born deaf and spent my first five years like that, my entire existence was without sound." The girl accentuated the words with furious movements of her hands, what Amelie assumed to be sign language.
"Something...happened, and I was cured of that affliction. It’s another story on its own, so I’ll leave that for later. Unfortunately, the cure came with an odd price, or maybe an odd gift. The cure for my deafness was not at the hands of any doctor, not from tubes and knives. They tried though, tried everything." She tilted her head a little, folding an ear away to expose a thick scar. It was mirrored on the other side.
"My cure came in the form of a single word, uttered into my ear."
"A word, cured your deafness?" Amelie asked, perplexed. Kokopelli made a strange sound, one of aggravation, of worry. "What was the word?" Amelie smiled, leaning in.
"Are you sure, you want to hear it?" Collette asked, her story paused.
"Yes!" Amelie was tantalized.
Collette's mouth opened, yet nothing poured forth. Some impossible force snatched it away at the root, pulling it into the nether of unreality. Even the movements of her mouth seemed to cease being for that brief moment. The wind of the word the girl uttered was hidden from Amelie. It simply did not exist.
"Did you catch it?" Collette asked, her lungs glowing in bursting pants. "I can say it again, I can say it again and again and again and again. I can scream it from the rooftops, I can record it, I can do anything, but it simply cannot be expressed!" Her eyes flinched, betraying a horrified expression, something dancing on the border of madness.
Her mouth opened again, and that same blurriness took it over, the universe itself swallowed the word. She opened her mouth again, her face in a scream this time, her eyes closed tight. Again she screamed the word, this time her fists clenched. Nothingness was her reward. Again she screamed it, tears flowed down her face.
"Stop...stop..." Amelie said, grasping the little girl, trying to lock frantic eyes into her own, to help ground her into reality once again.
"It can't be written." The girl choked. "It can't be explained, it can only be spoken, and I am alone in being able to hear it." Collette looked down at the floor, sobbing. "I can keep secrets, you see, even the ones I try not to, even the ones I want to share with everyone."
“It’s alright. I…” Amelie hugged Collette tight, wondering how many times she had paid a toll in blood.
"It's the name of something. It means the name of a language, it means the universe itself, and everything, and nothing all at once." Collette pulled away from Amelie's embrace, her fists balled up, grabbing the hem of her skirt. "It opened my mind when it tore through my deafness. It opened my tiny, undeveloped brain to the raw knowledge of everything that is. I knew it all for a tiny fraction of a second, and then it all submerged into an ocean. If I see things, sometimes I can remember words that describe them more perfectly, ones that are primal and etched into stone. Sometimes I dream, and in the dreams I can remember more of them, but I forget almost all of it when I wake up.”
Collette chuckled now, her moods swinging wildly. "It taught me a language, you know. A language I think your little friend would hate to hear." Collette gave another vicious grin. “There are a few words I can see. They sit at the bottom of the spiral etched in this language, but I can always see them, always let them flow forth.”
"No..." Kokopelli trailed off. He moved towards her, anticipating something.
"
"What was that!?" Amelie asked. Kokopelli leapt back, his fur puffed up in aggravation.
"Where did you learn that!? Who spoke the word into your ear, child?!" He demanded.
Amelie ignored his incredulousness. "It wasn't English, but I understood it as if it were." Amelie pondered, her eyes squinting at the little girl before her. "There was something, like the sound of chimes...no...bells?" It had been both, and more.
"You heard the song of it then." Collette said, slipping back into English. "Most just perceive it as whatever language they first learned, but with a subtle music underlying it. I didn't figure that out for a year."
"Say something in it again!" Amelie said, her eyes wide with astonishment.
"
"Stop! Stop it!" Kokopelli roared. "You must not speak those words, even in your tongue. If you speak them I will strike you down.” His voice shook the bed with a terrifying wrath.”
Yet before Amelie could even glance at him, his temper cooled. “I apologize. Simply keep to your own language, and we will have no issue.” His voice wound down to normal.
"He isn't speaking English, you know." Collette said, a sly smile on her face as she regarded the cat creature.
"He isn't? It sounds like it to me." Amelie said, thinking back. Other than the strange crackling of his voice, it had always been English to her.
"One of the byproducts of that word, is that I know all derivative languages. Not in that I can speak them, unfortunately, and not that I have a repository of every language in the world either. I know them when I hear them, I know their sources and meanings.”
Kokopelli made a growling sound, his back braced by the bed stand.
"He speaks to you in the language of beasts." She declared. "I've heard it very few times, it's an interesting one to be sure. It's one of those languages that’s more than just words, it has lingering magic inside of it."
"Language of beasts?" Amelie asked, looking at Kokopelli.
"I can't...I'm not allowed to speak of these things." He said, his eyes narrowed.
"The language of beasts is only for those who listen for it. The knowledge itself that animals can talk is enough to hear them, though you still must strain to hear them if they aren't speaking to you."
"You seem to know so much, so much more than I did." Amelie said.
"The side effect of the cure to my deafness was that it awakened a hunger inside of my mind. Having the knowledge of the profound run through my conscious brought with it the hunger, and a foisted maturity. I returned to my mother, cured. At first my parents were thrilled, exalted, they believed it to be a miracle, a gift from the heavens themselves. At first they thought my hunger for knowledge was a side effect of hearing, that I would grow tired of my search, and return to the carefree little girl they had known."
"I remember that half of my life, I remember almost all of it. I remember learning to walk, learning to communicate with my parents, I remember it. It seems, however, like there were two people there, like the life previous to my knowledge was a dream, a shadow of what is real."
"My parents grew more and more concerned, and began to see the changes in me as a thing of horror, something to be reviled. I saw that, the changes in them, and I worked to restrain myself. I tried to act as they expected, as the world expected of me but it was hard, so hard."
"Isn't intelligence something to be celebrated?" Amelie smiled. "My parents are thrilled at how well I do."
"I..." Collette paused. “It wasn’t so bad at first, my parents didn’t hate me all at once.” She took a deep breath, stealing another moment of silence. “What turned the concern and worry to disgust was…” She glanced at the cat creature a moment. “One of the things they taught me was music, and how to sing. At least they tried to.”
Kokopelli lurked at Amelie’s side, glaring in silence.
“I can’t do it, can’t sing like normal people do.” She shivered a little. “It’s like something possesses me, a raw force and I�
�m not in control of the sound that comes out…”
“I sung like that for my mother only once.” There was an omission, a dark misery coming over the girl’s face. "You asked about my silence. It's simply best for me not to speak, it's something I've learned to do, to allow those around me the illusion that I am more normal than I am. Even my words, my normal words, seem to horrify those around me and I didn't want to alienate anyone here. At least that was it at first. As I met Melissan, saw her in need, I kept up the ruse, hoping to protect her from what she feared. It failed. I saw it all, I saw the corruption, I knew the crows, I saw you."
"But, how could you know me just by looking?" Amelie frowned, hearing that repeated. "I can understand the crows, I can understand him I guess."
“The name for your kind is etched into the bottom of that pit. It’s a little up the ways, a little ways into the evolution of thought,”
“Do not speak it.” The cat froze as a scowling gargoyle, the fires burning from his eyes and breath, his little heart pulsing with fury.
Collette shrugged. “It seems I am restrained. In truth I wonder why others cannot see it.” She smiled meekly. “Even without that scrawled knowledge I can feel the strangeness about you when I’m this close. I think most simply choose to deny. It’s possible with silence comes introspection, self-awareness, but still I feel the tells are clear. The season’s name is one of the words scrawled in the pit, carved into the very beginning of the universe, an unbreakable law ever upheld. I knew it when it came. I felt the life within the wave, and even without knowing its name I felt the choice offered to those caught in its wake.”
"The choice?" Amelie allowed the divergence a moment.
"It was
The word flowed into Amelie’s ears with the ringing song of chimes interlaced into it. She could taste a meaning hidden behind the word, but failed to grasp it before it had filtered beyond her grasp.
"I am here because I chose it. You perhaps are not." Collette shook her head. "I hoped that I would find something in this, something to explain, maybe just something different." She shrugged.
"I can see that in you too. I could believe that you could do anything, but I can see that potential radiating from you where others would simply see the miracle." She nodded.
"Fine." Amelie looked away with guilt. It was something she, herself understood. It was something she had been forcibly denying as well the entire time. Her mind had manifested it as a shrieking denial, and it seemed that those around her had denied what they had seen from her as well.
"Why couldn't you just speak up, why couldn't you talk to Melissan, explain to her?" Amelie chose to turn back the flow of the conversation to something less probing to herself.
"Because...my mind may be sharp, enlightened, but I am still just a child to those around me." Collette said finally, allowing the return to the previous topic. "I could declare it to them, I could tell Melissan my story, but then she would not have the child to hold, to cuddle when she needed those things. Even then, no one would believe me, no one would have listened. It is the curse of the child's knowledge you see." She said, growing quiet.
"I envy you, Amelie. You are special, you are different, but you are close enough to an adult to be taken seriously by adults. They see you and can choose to deny that strangeness to you. They seem unable to do the same for me."
"A saying they're fond of, adults that is; 'Wisdom comes from the mouth of babes'." Collette gave a jeer at the phrase. "That sums up what it's like, being more than you appear, more than they expect."
"I don't understand." Amelie said, confused. "Doesn't that mean, that they would think that what you had to say had more importance, more weight?"
"No. It illustrates the hypocrisy of the way the adult world thinks. The phrase itself declares that wisdom comes from children, but only because they are untainted, unknowing of the world around them. The wisdom used to prove this point is always in the form of being without bias, being ignorant of constraints, being blissful and foolish. These are things that adults find endearing, and things they expect to see. They are not things I find myself able to fake any longer." She sighed.
"I resigned myself. To watch, to wait, to let my body grow, let the years catch up with my mind."
"Don't they see you as an intelligent being? Don't they let you be that way?" Amelie felt guilty suddenly. "My parents, would have understood you, Collette."
"Then you have my full envy." Collette smiled. "It's one of those things in life, intangible, and almost not present it's so subtle. People may claim to understand the intelligence of someone they consider a child, yet there are things that come with adulthood. There is a weight that comes with maturity, however unearned, however undeserved."
"It makes me happy, to have someone who can understand for once." Collette’s breath seemed genuinely lighter. “It soothes my weary feet and heart.” Amelie found herself trapped in her rutted notions, that this was a child in front of her, that her story was a fanciful make believe tale. "But now...you get to tell me YOUR secrets." She grinned.
"Oh, my secrets?" Amelie thought quickly, looking at Kokopelli.
"Pound for pound." Collette beamed.
“I think I couldn’t ask for a more perfect brain to pick.” Amelie smiled sadly. “Kokopelli, would the prices paid allow for a retelling, word for word?”
“Perhaps, but feeling them flow from your mouth, tracing the fingers of your memory around the curves and points as you remember them—perhaps there is value in that as well.” He gave a hunched shrug. “Of course your parents would be against it, but we crossed that line an eternity ago, it seems.”
"Well, with such a roaring endorsement, how can I possibly say no?" Amelie beamed, readying to lessen her own weight to her confidant.
Her pound stretched in detail and time before her. She spoke first of her affinity with the winds, of the kite. Collette stopped her frequently, biting into the knowledge offered, yet lacking any of the dry reservation of the scientists or the manic desperation of The Professor.
Amelie spoke of her experience under the overpass, of her travels. She spoke of Meldice with fond remembrance of her kindness, her hospitality. Of Mrs. Woolley with sad admiration and regret. She spoke of M'grevor, not able to hold back tears, telling the little girl of her all too short time with the group, and at the house.
She spoke carefully of Terror of Night, not finding the proper speech to describe the numbness it brought. She explained the feeling of it dying that night, and of being reduced to stars. She relayed the meetings with The Professor directly, which Collette seemed to digest in pensive silence before admitting she had yet to meet him directly.
Finally as the sun began its descent in earnest, she began the stories which she had purchased. She first introduced Kokopelli with as precise a description as her memory allowed: as a trickster, and a guardian.
To her astonishment, when she began speaking of the first of Kokopelli’s explanations, the colours smeared upon the lit air, trembling with the unsure retelling. They danced with crisp lines and clarity, transcending touch when she recalled them with precision, and when she faltered they slurred, their colours smearing against the air as they moved.
Collette sat wide eyed and silent. Every word fell sharply into her ears, every movement reflected in her sparkling eyes. Amelie found that by trying to force the memories less, to allow them to flow, to picture each as a scene unto itself before submitting her words, that her recollection sharpened to near perfection.
The explanations relayed and the last of the stories told, the scene with the parents and their child, their choice made, faded into the dimming afternoon sun.
Now and then within the telling Collette’s breath had caught, become pensive, and then mutt
ered a word without gifting it her voice. She returned to that thoughtful quiet, but now so in force.
She wobbled to her feet, and made a sagely trot, arriving at a great pane of glass, dwarfing her tiny figure. She touched it, running both her tiny palms down it, and looked out into the setting sun beyond.
“When I touch all of this, the clay but especially the glass, I can hear something,” the girl muttered. “Like voices, all repeating a single sequence of time.”
Amelie shuffled beside her, touching the glass and feeling nothing, the black shapes of the crows crowding to shield her from the sun.
“Each pane holds a legion of different voices, a thousand different fragments of time remembered. They speak in a language like my own, but it is not, it is another derivative somehow. But sometimes I get the faintest glimpse.” She made a circling point to a meaningless quadrant of the pane. “I can hear a single voice rising above them all, a man. He speaks in that tongue, and the more I trace it, the more I think that I could reach out to him, to understand what was given to me.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Amelie muttered, her hand touching the indicated place.
“To you it seems to sound like singing sometimes, but above all else there is a moment of time that speaks with a clarity that you can understand. The scream of a million voices in concert, in some mockery of a divine language. To cut into the clay or the glass is to force it to remember that moment, the moment this place died.”
Amelie stood, feeling a pause in her rhythm, but the inhalation to continue.
“You see, this place sings to me, this is where I should be. Your stories all taste so familiar. Many of the words I can see etched into that pit’s wall shone in your stories, though with careful vagueness.” She glanced at Kokopelli. “And I think I understand what he wants.”
"I think...I think that everyone knows the 'Silent Season' is a temporary thing. It's some kind of instinct, something in the back of your mind. It's there, though; you can feel it when you look at the world, really look at it I mean." She gazed out onto the endless sea of brown before them. "The world is watching us, waiting for some kind of decision, some kind of resolution."
