Erin Slaughter
When I can no longer hide that I haven't been sleeping, I work up the courage to tell my husband what I'm afraid of.
He looks up. What? That noise? It's just a plane. A car with a busted exhaust pipe.
But I'm not so sure.
He turns back to his computer screen or his cell phone screen or his video game screen, and I turn away, too, as if having said the thing is enough—as I understand saying the thing is not a path to opening some new door inside me, where fear can finally tumble out like so many mountains of dirty laundry stuffed in a child's closet.
I tell my therapist how I cower in the grated corner by the cat food, wrapped in the blanket my grandmother crocheted for my thirtieth birthday, a handful of weeks before she died, trembling in wait as the sound rises and rises, rattling the walls, shaking leaf-clung branches loose from the trees, until the noise is sucked back into the void it emerged from. Sometimes, I get so nervous with anticipation when the crescendo starts that I crawl, blanket draped over my back like a lioness carrying the corpse of her cub, to the bathroom across the hall and vomit.
The therapist prescribes me Ativan, noting, Women seem to have more luck with it.
I'd lost my job, but it was probably for the best that I got fired when I did. I caught myself gripping my desk when the heater switched on, the clanging growing louder in the vents overhead, like the hot breath of a beast drawing its mouth ever-closer. I had to replace my aluminum water bottle with a plastic one because the crescendo showed up at the cooler, and I feared it an omen of devastations to come. Each evening, I bolted to the parking lot and drove straight home, a dread-stone heavy in my stomach, like something big was about to happen.
On my therapist's recommendation, I try massaging the scowl out of my face, sticking my fingers in a secret notch between my jaw and cheekbone. But then the crescendo comes once more, and again, I'm scraping and biting and crawling. My therapist says, You have to learn how to protect yourself without maiming yourself to do it. If anyone alive has learned such a skill, I don't trust them.
When my husband and I have sex, I don't let myself come. I let him work on my body until he feels useful. Crouched like an animal, I clasp my hands in front till he jolts, and ends, and slithers away. When he begins to snore, I take my blanket to the corner and hide in wait for the crescendo. It's rare that I sleep, but when I do, I dream of a faceless person clinging to a thick braided rope, climbing higher and higher.
The only person other than my husband who I've spoken to in a month is the neighbor, Helen. Her husband recently left her so she got two big dogs, a Great Dane and a bluetick hound, to help her forget the extra space. But she can't afford the townhouse on her own, so she'd be moving away soon, too, to stay with her mother, at forty-three and with a master's degree in engineering.
We sit on her porch drinking the last cans of her gone husband's beer, and I ask her about the crescendo, if she'd ever noticed it. She shakes her head, and describes a dream she had while feverish as a child: everything was dark, but she felt the hot shadow of monsters around her, huge, furry monsters with gooey, wet fangs, and the noises they made. She says she can still remember the noise so clearly, that even now it sometimes comes back to her in the seconds before waking, like breaking through to the surface of the ocean from a deep place.
I ask her to do the noise. Helen puts her beer down and stares into the damp, chirping night. When the sound starts, it takes me a second to understand it's coming from within her. From between her lips, she exhales a creepy whine, soft at first, growing louder and louder until it sounds like a siren, a harsh and helpless thing made of meat and absolute failure, the end of the world.
Yes, I say, that's it.
She says, Well, that's how monsters speak.
Past the oily light cast over our street, the whistling begins again.