[...but what if we're the sideshow and they're the crowd?]

     There was no sound; the room was clotted with silence. Furniture neatly arranged, floors swept, shelves straightened. All tidy. And silent. No florescent bulbs singing, no fans humming, no papers whispering, central air choked off. Just to clarify, no noise was being made. Got it? Silent. Even the guy sitting on the couch with the shotgun in his lap wasn’t making a sound.
      All the lights were off. Through the blinds a little secondhand streetlight seeped in, but it rapidly dissolved in the dark. No candles, no lamps, no glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, no LEDs, no warning lights or backlit displays; even the little light bulb in the microwave had been unscrewed. Nothing. The guy sitting on the couch didn’t seem to mind; nobody recorded the shotgun’s opinion.

     Sitting on the couch, Adam is looking at something. Hands at his sides, he is listening to something. Shotgun in his lap, he doesn’t seem to realize that there is nothing to see and nothing to hear. His attention is calmly, politely, and implacably focused on a spot about three feet in front of him. If the lights were on, he could see the telephone. If his ears were freakishly keen, he might hear the hum of the telephone wire (cross-country lines fairly drone—household wires emit a vibration inaudible even to dogs).
     Adam sits as if set in stone by a careless sculptor; he sits as an attentive pupil before a favorite teacher; sits as a captured soldier; sits as the interrogator; sits as on the subway; sits as in a movie; sits as if unaware of the shotgun in his lap. If he is waiting for something to happen, he gives no sign; if he is watching something already in progress, Adam offers no evidence. He only sits, hands at his sides and feet precisely parallel, staring at the spot where he knows the phone to be.
     He has been sitting thus for a little over four days. So far, nothing has changed but the light. 
     Shattering both darkness and silence, the telephone abruptly explodes into life. Leaping into the air like a demented Warner Bros prop, it buzzes and flashes at random, filling the collapsed silence with its own hot emptiness. Before it can ring again Adam is on his feet, screaming back at the jangling, flaring device; shotgun in his grip, he blows the telephone into very tiny pieces before shooting himself.

• Posted at Wednesday, December 3, 2008 08:42 PM
• In Short Fiction Category | Permalink