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You are lying in your crib, in the still and cloying dark, the first time you hear something die.
It’s caught in the walls. It hadn’t been paying enough attention, had gotten too careless weaving through the rotting bones of the dingy little apartment. It had known the errant nail was there, it had crossed it a dozen times a day over the course of its short life. But all it takes is one mistake. Now the rusty tip of the nail emerges from its thigh. Staying still is agony. Moving is agony. It already knows it’s too late.
That doesn’t stop it from begging. For help, for mercy, and then, eventually, for company. To not die alone in the dark.
You don’t understand any of this, of course. Everything is still so fresh and raw, for you, and language is still just another kind of noise. When you scream, it is wordless, simple fear at the sounds from the walls.
So the rat dies alone. Your mother, exhausted after hours spent trying to soothe you, does not question why your cries eventually quiet. She doesn’t know why they start again a few nights later, can’t hear the screaming from the trap she’s laid out, only yours. She admits to her work friends, with a taut smile, that you’re a bit of a handful. It isn’t long before she understands your “episodes” can’t be fixed, and gives up trying, and leaves you alone together with the dying.
You start speaking very young. Your first word is “please”. Not just precocious, but polite! Vivian enthuses. She’s less tired, by then. Your episodes are over. You have given up on trying to make the noise stop, and her child is finally normal, and it doesn’t matter where you heard it enough to learn it. From the rats, of course, but what really taught you is the flies, waiting in the dark for the rodents to still, for the meat to cool, tiny minds with just enough room for hunger they cannot help but beg for release from: please, please, please.
You’re at the park, in low summer sunlight, the first time you understand there’s something wrong with you.
You like the park more than your apartment. It’s not less noisy; quite the opposite, it’s so endlessly loud that the individual voices smear together into a hum you can sometimes almost ignore. Birds argue, bees mutter directions to themselves so they don’t forget, squirrels bounce from one panic to the next, humans babble the same calm nonsense as ever, and it all just washes over you as you play in the sand. You keep to your side of the sandbox, because the ant colony on the other side had said “please” when it asked you to leave, and it’s important to you now that you respond to that word when you can.
Something is moaning in the bushes nearby. This isn’t unusual, especially on hot days like this, when the puddles have all dried up. In fact, that’s one of the reasons you like weather like this; when something is dying of thirst, talking takes too much energy. Screaming, even more so. Death on days like today is quiet.
Usually. But not on this day, because the moaning thing that shuffles out of the bushes is a dog, and dogs, like humans, don’t know when it’s time to let go.
“It hurts,” the dog whines. “God, it really hurts.”
Your attention stays on the sand, raking furrows and watching them fill back in. You’re not going to try and build a castle today, obviously. Not with the ants here. You don’t want to hear about how they’d do it instead.
The dog staggers closer. “Human,” it says. “Hey. There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong, and it hurts.”
“Sorry,” you say absently, watching sand trickle down into the divots you’ve scratched out.
This was a mistake. The dog perks up. “You can- oh, thank god. You have to help me. I ate something, I don’t know what, and it hurts, something’s wrong. Please.”
There’s that word. And you know, you know, that this is not one of the times you can respond. But you do anyway.
“Sorry,” you say again. “It’s too late.” Because the flies have started up too. They’re simple things, but if there’s one thing they know, it’s how this ends. But they don’t know when, only that it’s not yet, and so the hungry voices buzz: please, please, please.
“No,” the dog says desperately. “No, it’s not. I’m still okay. I can get better. I need to see a doctor, and they’ll give me a shot, and I’ll be okay. That’s how it goes. I just need help.”
“You won’t make it,” you say softly. “Listen. The flies know. It’s too late.”
“It can’t be,” the dog whimpers. “I’m just a puppy. It can’t be my time. It’s not fair.”
“I don’t think it’s ever fair,” you say to the sand. You understand, vaguely, what “fair” is, and it just seems like a mean joke. Saying there’s a way things should be just so you can get upset when they aren’t? It’s the kind of problem only humans and the things too close to them make up for themselves.
But that’s what you are, isn’t it? Some other human told this dog there was such a thing as fair, and now it’s asking you to make it real. You can’t, and you know you can’t. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything. It said please.
You finally look up. It drools helplessly onto its well-groomed fur, its eyes are wild and unfocused; its vision is probably already going. It can still see enough to flinch when you stand up, step out of the sandbox, walk over to it. “I can’t help you,” you say. “But I can sit with you. So you won’t be alone.”
It is quiet, for a long moment, while the flies beg, please, please, please. Then it lets its shaky legs give out, with a quiet finality. It knows it will not get up again. “I’d like that,” it says.
So you do. And you talk to it, as its voice grows weaker. Its- his- name is Cinnamon. He lived in a nice place that’s really high up, and he loved to look out the big windows at the streets below. He had a lot of time to do that, with his mom, his human, away at work so often. He missed her, often, but never felt unloved. Because of days like today, when she makes time, when they go to the park. When he had left her sight for just a moment too long, found something leaking from a bottle that smelled like it would taste good. The pain had started quickly after that. He hadn’t been able to find her again.
“She won’t know what happened to me,” he whines, slurring now. “She’ll think I ran away.”
“She won’t,” you say. “I’ll find her. I’ll tell her-”
And then, at last, your own mom notices you. “What are you doing?”, she yells, high and panicked. “Get away from that thing!”
“It’s okay, mama,” you say as soothingly as you can as she storms over. “It’s almost over. I told Cinnamon I’d find his mom-”
She doesn’t listen. She sweeps you up into her arms. “Wait,” Cinnamon says. “No, wait. You were going to stay with me. You promised, please-”
You try to make your mother understand. You try to tell her that it matters because it’s all you can do. That he’d said please.
But she doesn’t listen. She bundles you off to the car as you devolve into screaming and crying, now just to try and drown out Cinnamon’s voice, and the voice of the flies, so close to their salvation: please, please, please.
So the dog dies alone. And you learn there’s something wrong with you, that even afterwards you still don’t understand why it has to be this way. But you do learn that there’s nothing you can do.
You are being picked up from school when you learn your mother is dying.
You’re standing alone again, as you wait. You don’t have friends. You can’t risk it. When you’ve tried before, you’ve slipped up, and then it’s been more doctors, more interviews with people with false smiles stretched over worry. More time spent with your mind swaddled in cotton and wax as you try another new medication. The pills aren’t all bad, but they also don’t fix you. Sometimes they actually make it worse, make it harder to remember what you are and are not supposed to hear, and you reply to something you shouldn’t. And then there’s an argument, hours upon hours of screaming as you try to explain that no, you are taking them, you’re trying, you don’t want to be this way either. If one of the medications actually could make it quiet, you can’t imagine ever going a day without it.
But they don’t. And when you try to explain, the argument gets worse. You can handle screaming, of course you can, but that doesn’t mean you enjoy it. So you have stopped trying, stopped getting into situations that you have to explain, and your mother is not one of the screams you hear as often anymore.
So you don’t have friends. Not that it’s a problem. “Lonely” is something you understand in the same way you understand “fair”: a cruel joke people tell, for no reason at all.
You don’t know this, there’s no way you could, but Vivian thinks she understands what’s happened. She thinks that the price the Holler took from her is you, is making you into this. Making you willful, and manipulative, and cruel to her when she’s just trying to help make you better. Vivian doesn’t know this, but her “understanding” is another part of that price. It only took the slightest touch, just a moment more of resentment for what she’s lost, what she gave up for your happiness. That’s all. But it was enough to start the rot that has spread through her, made you her enemy without her even realizing. Neither of you will ever know where the line falls between what’s been done to you, and what you’ve done to yourselves. And, ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that when she pulls up, the frosty silence of the car you climb into is broken by something. It’s a fly that’s blundered into the vehicle, can’t muster the understanding to leave. This isn’t unusual, even on the days when the car is cleaned for appearances, when the trash that’s too much for either of you to handle hasn’t built up.
But this is different. Familiar, bone-deep. Please, buzzes the fly, ravenous for something more pure than old food wrappers. Please, please, please.
You don’t know how they always know, how they can smell rot that hasn’t happened yet, but they do. And they haven’t been following you chanting their pleas, no matter how much you listen for them with something like hope.
It’s not you. So the answer is simple.
You think, distantly, that you’re surprised they haven’t turned up sooner. You don’t understand the source of the rot in Vivian, but you have known it’s there for as long as you can remember. But, after all, flies don’t care about resentment, or guilt, or the way that anger is safer than fear. Flies care about their hunger. And it is only now that the rot has become real for them too. It is only now your mother has begun to become food.
She’s never stopped trying to understand you, even while she thinks she already does. So she notices your preoccupation.
“You okay?” she says softly, eyes fixed on the road.
“Yeah,” you say. You don’t understand why she asks that sometimes. Why would you be anything else?
You’re an adult when your mother finally dies.
You’ve dropped out in the middle of a semester, for the second time in as many years. But this one will be the last, at least on her account. It’s never bothered you. The only reason you still go is because it makes her as close to happy as she’s been capable of for most of your life. At first you’d been excited for a chance at long last for some kind of explanation. Whatever is wrong with you, it’s biological. Everything is, of course, but in college you were finally given a chance to meet people who understood that. A biology degree was an excuse to hole up in a library and start looking for yourself with no suspicion, to ask questions people would actually try to answer. To seek answers in neurochemistry, in linguistic substructures, in models of troupe dynamics. From the crows on campus, late at night when everyone was either asleep or drunk the way you pretended to be (and sometimes did not need to pretend).
There were no answers, of course. You feel foolish having ever hoped there might have been. But Vivian was so proud of her clever child, who’d been such an avid reader from so young, surely a sign of genius and not being drowned in language since their first breath. You’d gotten as close to getting along as you ever would, finally out from under her roof, bringing her home pleasant lies about your thriving social life, your summer research job, your hobbies and your dating life. Your normalcy. She’d smiled, and she’d seemed to mean it, and it’s not like you had any better reason than that to do anything.
But the whole time, for as long as you’ve been the person you are now, she’s been getting worse. A slow, horrible struggle against the inevitable, year by agonizing year, the rusty tip of cancer still pinned through her no matter how she tried to get free. Every time you saw her, just a little louder, the buzzing: please, please, please. So you weren’t surprised when you got the call that it would soon, finally, be over.
You are a little surprised by what’s waiting for you when you finally get there. Not how she looks, you can barely remember what she was like before she was a corpse. But what she says is unexpected. Maybe playing at being the remarkable person she’d always hoped you would be, instead of what you are, had done something after all. She’s never apologized like this.
“I tried,” she says, voice slurred and trembling. “And I know I screwed up. I know I did, I didn’t understand. I was just so scared. For you. But I tried-” a tremor wracks her. It won’t be long now.
“I’m sorry,” she manages.
“I know,” you say. “It’s okay. I’m okay.” It’s not even a lie, it’s just… noise. Something to make her own noises stop.
They don’t. “Please keep being okay,” she says, barely audible. “Please. I don’t care what else you are. I never did. Just be okay. Please. Please.”
And just like every other time, you know better. You don’t get to choose that. No one does. But the dying animal in this hospital room is in pain, and even all this time later you still don’t understand why it has to be this way.
“I will,” is the noise you make in response. “I promise.”
Neither of you say anything else. But, even in this sterile place, the chorus that has accompanied Vivian Scarlet for so long gives its final performance: please, say the flies who have been waiting for her. Please, please, please.
At last, as you sit next to her in the quiet room, your mother dies alone. You leave the cooling meat of her behind, the flies to their long-awaited feast, and you feel nothing. Why would you?
You’re making your last preparations when your phone buzzes.
You don’t bother to check it. It does this sometimes, has since you stopped showing up for classes. Academic advisors, at first. At one point, a professor who’d enjoyed your questions, his voice politely concerned. Then, eventually, loan companies. Deferrals over, repayment beginning. Just more noise.
So you ignore it, and take one more pass through your checklist. Utilities shut off, withdrawal letters finally sent, a text to the building manager explaining the situation set to go out automatically 24 hours from now. You think maybe you’re only bothering with any of it as some leftover momentum from performing for your mother, the last pitiful gasp of normalcy before curtain call. It’s not like you have anything else to be doing, anymore. You never have.
You’ve been listening all week, since you settled on your method, found the garden supply store that would actually sell you what you needed. But even with the castor plant sitting on your battered little folding table, heavy with fruit in its little plastic pot, you can’t hear the flies.
You’re a little disappointed, but not much. Even you are not exempt. Everything dies alone.
Your phone buzzes again. The loan company must have left a message, which they rarely bother with anymore. But it occurs to you that if the text explaining where to find you is going to go out as planned, you should be completely sure your phone will be charged. It doesn’t like to cooperate with the charger, it takes a little fiddling-
On the screen is a notification it takes you a moment to understand. You’d forgotten you even had a Facebook, it was just something else to put your mom’s mind at ease that you were doing just fine, a way she could reach you if she ever tried to become more tech savvy, which she never would.
It’s just more noise. But something about it compels you. So you open the app. You have to scroll for a moment. Please, begins a message from something you once pretended normalcy with before it disappears off the top of the screen.
Hey, says the first of the latest messages. This is Tabitha Scarlet. Pearlanne’s daughter. We’re cousins.
You keep reading. And, eventually, you decide that if the castor plant doesn’t survive the week without you, you can just go get another one, and the flies can have what this one crumbles into. It’s not like you have anything else that needs doing instead.
You have just stepped off the bus the first time you feel actual grief about your mom’s death.
The ride had been uneventful, in a way that was itself an event for you. The last part had involved an animal making noise at you for a while, which had eventually ended in a bag of peanuts you’d bolted down immediately, knowing better than to let food out of your sight. But aside from that, it’s been… quiet.
Not silent. Never silent. But the farther from the city you got, the less anything had to say. The facts of the world are simple and obvious to things that do not live on concrete, in a way you’d only thought you knew before. When mice were snatched up by owls outside of the dingy bus stops, they’d screamed, but their screams hadn’t been about fairness. Just noise.
So you were in a better mood than you knew you could be as you were getting off the bus, relishing in the simplicity of it all. A nice sendoff, to return to the basics of life in your twilight hours.
Later, you will be upset with yourself, for expecting anything to be simple in the endlessly churning world. But in your defense, you didn’t know what you feel when you first sight Tabitha was something you could prepare for.
Because Vivian is gone. She’s been gone for years. She was gone for years before her death, and now she’s disappeared into countless generations of flies. You felt nothing when her face stilled for the last time, except perhaps relief.
This is not Vivian’s face. It’s different, in a lot of ways. It looks like the photos you saw, it’s not the appearance that’s surprising. Maybe what stops your breath short is that this is real, and it’s not Vivian, despite the ways it is the same face outnumbering the ways it is different. The scowl is familiar, but the eyes are new. The Scarlet cheekbones are unmistakable, the face they anchor unknown.
She doesn’t look like your mom. She doesn’t look like you. She is not a corpse that has not yet given itself to the flies. She’s alive. She’s real. She’s-
“Hey, Tabitha,” you croak. And it’s important to you, somehow, that it means something to her. That it- that you- are not just noise.
You are standing in an empty house when you begin to understand the magnitude of the problem. This house is a corpse, well-rotten, and corpses should not be this silent.
There are animals here, of course, wood louse chewing the walls and mammals huddling in the dark, but it’s all so muted. Like everything here is afraid to call any attention to itself, to make any noise. Even in the fungal riot of the kitchen, you can’t hear the flies.
It’s there that you gently probe at things- your French is not good at all, and you only have the assurances of others that you and most of the animals you know speak “English” anyway, but you manage something that could pass as a joke about the cat’s name. Tabitha responds with annoyance instead of recognition, and a hope you’d never nurtured to begin with collapses into rot. She is not like you. She is not the answer to your question.
To this question. But you find yourself with more, and no one to ask them of. Frou-Frou is as cats often are, Dustin is reasonably too afraid to offer insight. So here you stand, in the corpse of a house, reflexively straining to catch noise that will not come.
You don’t want to be here. You don’t understand how anything could. For the first time in your life, you begin to understand “lonely” as anything other than a cruel joke, and somehow it’s even less funny.
It’s when you find words forming in your mind, desperate for a break in the silence- please, please, please- that you decide you need to leave.
For now. Maybe it will be different later, when Tabitha is here.
You are walking back up the hill, in the dark, when you first feel something you think might be hope.
Your day has been like none you’ve ever had before. The constricting, crushing shell of the life you knew is gone, and you are surprised to discover the room to breathe this new one gives you. You think you might have friends. You told jokes, not for the cover but because you wanted to, and they weren’t good but sometimes people smiled anyway.
An animal called Duke is dead. Your new friends seemed upset about this, in a way that irritates you- they live here, where it’s simple, how can they not know how it goes?- but you swallowed it down, because even though they are clearly unsettled by your reaction to death, they did not leave. They asked if you’re okay. You don’t understand why they would ask, but suddenly that lack of understanding is a question, not just a certainty.
The animal called Gretchen had told you that the animal called Stella is uncomfortable in cars, and for the first time since your mother died, you tried to help. A simple touch on the shoulder, nothing else, but it had worked, it had worked and you’d cared that it worked, and some of the noise you’ve been screaming all your life resolved quietly and perfectly into meaning.
You are stopped in the dark, with the corpse of the Manor in view, when that meaning begins to reach you. You don’t know what happened tonight. You don’t understand why the Gardeners are silent, when nothing else is. You don’t know what they want, what the circle of rot they sowed is for, why the pleading of the flies there did not seem to be from hunger alone.
This is not how things are. This is not the noise your life has been. You don’t understand, and as you stare at the ruined hulk of Tabitha’s home, you realize that this means that maybe you never did. That maybe you still can.
Please, you murmur. Please, please, please.
You are sitting outside a hole in the ground, covered in the dust it tried to choke you with, when the panic begins to set in. Someone’s put a blanket over your shoulders. Nearby, the animal called Oscar is promising his daughter he’ll be right behind her as she’s loaded into the ambulance. You wish, distantly, that it was just noise. It should be.
It isn’t. For most of today, it would have been. For most of today, you would have taken her and run from the mine the moment you saw her. Some members of the herd will always die. It’s past time she knew that.
But then the carving had seen you. And it had shown you something you’d never known before.
Even now, as you sit outside shivering under a blanket, you are in the Shaw mine as it comes down around you. You are the first pebbles that fall, you are the bottomless terror at what they mean. You are the running, the panic, and you are the bodies trampled underfoot in that first rush. You are the man who gave his life to prop a tunnel just long enough for the children to get through, and you are the children too scared to take it. You are breaking bones and bubbling flesh and screaming, and you are the quiet after.
The quiet, but not the silence. Please, please, please.
And you know, now, in a way that you couldn’t before, that “fair” is not a cruel joke either. You still don’t know what it is, but you know now what it is not, have had it carved on your bones.
It is not children dying for greed. It is not children dying for pride. It is not your inaction. It is not hearing voices and calling them noise, when what they are saying is please. So when Rosalina had told you you needed to go back for her friends, you did.
It’s not that which is scaring you now, though, that you risked yourself for some things that would be meat before long anyway; yours will be no great loss either, the risk was inconsequential. It’s not looking at your cousin talking to the miners, and feeling the earth drop away beneath you as you understand how close she came to dying, or the way your terror at that idea is so immense you can barely perceive it, let alone understand why it’s there.
It’s not even feeling something you haven’t felt in a lifetime. A rat in the walls. A dog whining and drooling in the grass. Please.
It’s knowing that “sorry” isn’t enough. It never has been. It never will be. You just don’t know what is.
You are so, so scared of never knowing.
You are standing outside the Town Hall when you first begin to truly hate your mother.
It had begun much earlier in the day, in the corpse of another house, this one taxidermied but no less dead. You’d listened to Tabitha describe a life with the kind of purpose, the reason, you have always craved. She hadn’t said what kind of agony that life had been, but she hadn’t needed to. It’s written in every part of her, impossible to miss now you know what to look for, almost more her than she herself is. It’s in the way she’d talked about seeing the Outer Banks, and when you’d suggested that you go there together- go to the ocean, the source of all life and death, a place so loud for you even the thought of it hurts- she’d smiled. You’d realized, looking at that smile, that you would suffer an eternity of that noise for her, if it meant she could smile like that again.
You still don’t know what fair is, but you know exactly what it isn’t. This isn’t. The Hollow on her shoulders as she stands alone, breaking under its weight and remaining silent. Never being allowed to say it; help me. Please.
You should have been here. You should have been here for her. This was your burden to bear as well, you could have shouldered that pain with her, and Vivian took it from you. Took her from you. Took you from her.
But that had been anger, not yet hate. Not until later, after a performance you never knew you could give, making noises like “justice” and “mercy” like they held any meaning, discovering that they did. That what Charlie Shaw asked of you- of Tabitha- was not fair.
You’d spoken well. You’ve never known how, the words just come out of you the way they do Gretchen or Dustin. But maybe what had moved Charlie wasn’t the noises you made, it was what you had really said: please. Please, please, please. Not this. Not to her. Not to anyone.
It had worked. Charlie is gone, because you spoke, and he listened.
And that is where the hate actually begins. None of this night has made any sense to you, or to anyone else except perhaps a man who’d lingered long after he’d already become flies. But everyone is okay, even him. Because you were here.
Because you’re home. Where you belong. For once, something here wasn’t unfair, because you are where you’ve always needed to be.
And Vivian had taken that from you. Taken you from them. Left them with nothing, given you nothing. Not answers, not a reason. Just noise. Just noise.
It isn’t fair, what she did to you all. Realizing that is what finally made you understand how much you hate her, always have, always will. One more thing that is finally right, now that you are home.
You are standing in the kitchen, between two empty pints of ice cream on one counter and Frou-Frou murmuring French in her sleep on the other, the first time you actually feel like a human.
You’d always thought it would feel like knowing your reason, for no longer having questions with no answers. You’d been very wrong. It’s not knowing, not even having the certainty of the flies waiting for you to confirm your place in the world. It is the terror of understanding what’s wrong, but not what’s right. Only that you should. You should.
You did a lot today. You made the first little step in making up for your absence; Tabitha- Tabby- should never have had to give Stella up, because you hadn’t been here to take up the weight she’d been made to replace her with. You can’t give them that time back, but you’ve given them what remains. The three of you had sat together in the dark, and when Stella told your joke, Tabby had laughed at it, just a little, and that laughter was more home than you’ve ever known.
But it’s not enough. The person called Reese is somewhere out there in the dark, trapped the way no animal should be, because you didn’t realize in time, didn’t get ahead of what the carving called you for. Weren’t fast enough, smart enough, wise enough. You weren’t enough. And that’s just the wound you can see.
You can feel the Hollow, now, as it breathes underneath you. You know that it has been bleeding, been dying, without you here to staunch its wounds. You are too late, were not here to heal so much of what you should have, and every thrash of pain it makes now, you are not enough to fix, no matter how you try. Someone gets hurt. Something dies. Tonight, Tabby smiled, but tomorrow it will sink its teeth back into her, try to drain her of what little she has left.
But, like the Gardeners, it won’t speak to you. You know that it wants, but you don’t know what. You know this is unfair, but you don’t know how to make it right. You know that it is lonely, and you don’t know how to take its trembling hand in yours like you did Tabitha’s, to promise it that it’s not alone.
There is so much you don’t know. You are so scared you won’t learn in time. But, at long last, you are trying.
So you stand in the too-silent corpse of the manor, stand in the dying Hollow, and you beg it; let me make this better. Please. Please, please, please.
You are exactly where you need to be when you finally get your answer. The answer you’ve always wanted.
The cell is small and dark, the anguish soaked into the walls far past the depth of the etchings. But beyond it, outside the barred window, you can hear the Hollow.
The birds delight in the endless joy of the sky. Snakes carry tender secrets through the underbrush. Beetles on the sill, squirrels on the trees, the dogs distantly calling to each other. Not noise. Meaning. You will never be lonely here. It will never just be noise again.
But that is not what guides you to the center of the cell, what lays you down gently on the filthy bedding. You can hear the Hollow now, at long last. You were listening the wrong way, the way you listen to rats and dogs and humans. You were listening for something vast and complex.
It is vast. But it is also simple. It’s always been so simple, the voice of your home. So you close your teary eyes, and smile as you listen.
It calls to you, and its calls mingle with the song of the flies in the dark cell: please, they say. Please, please, please.
And finally, finally, you can answer.