I: Mosquito ears

She went deaf for four months and was hit by a car. Broad daylight and she was walking across the street at a perfectly normal pace on a quiet road. The car slowed down—maybe to let her get out of the way—and then kept on driving until she was thrown onto the hood.

The first day after she went deaf she thought about faces.

The second day she thought about mouths.

The third day she got Beyoncé stuck in her head for fourteen hours.

To handle the silence, her brain constructed a tinny buzzing. The days were endless repetitions of silence, buzzing, silence buzzing; it didn't matter if people were around or not because she couldn't hear them anyway.

When she closed her eyes she was quite certain that nothing else in the world existed. She was a blank scrap of skin, floating in an empty world.


II: Well-meant

Her mom brought a deaf friend over for dinner. He could apparently read lips, but she refused to speak without being able to hear her voice, and so her mother made small-talk while she and the poor man stared at their silverware.

The first time her mom got frustrated she started shouting, which of course she couldn't hear. Something about that must have felt good, because she kept on going. Eyes glazed over, Mia would stare into the pages of a magazine and let her mother pour acid into her dull unhearing ears.


III: Also the car

His name was Jeff and he didn't believe in disability accommodations or safe spaces, but he felt bad about hitting the deaf girl crossing the road. In a ritual of self-castigation, he visited every month and sat with his shoulders hunched, reminding himself of his sins.

He also brought stale chocolate oranges and an enormous orange thermos. He drank from the thermos in great silent gulps that got his moustache wet. The chocolate oranges were for Mia.


IV: Organ of the soul

She woke up in the hospital to noise that at first felt like an echo inside her head. The buzzing had grown teeth, claws, and an appetite and was clawing away at the inside of her ears.

Human voices horrified her. Her groans were guttural, rough, inarticulate. Over the four months she had imagined language, it had gained shimmering spires and immense glass floors.

Language was dirty. Voices rasped against the corners of her brain like sandpaper. She heard herself start to hiccup and heave, and she felt herself start to cry.


V: Leaving, Breathing

A week passed and she was let out of the hospital. Her parents spoke to her in broken sentences, and she wrote her responses in angry paperripping pen. She told her parents she was leaving, packed a bag, and took a bus to the north shore.


The waves of Lake Superior are the breathing of the world.

She couldn't feel her feet, encased up to her ankles in clear water, and it made her head ache.

The world breathed.

The sound was inescapable.


VII: National birds; also candy

"THAT ALL?" he said to her lighter, socks, and Sweet Marie, his flannel labeled with Michipicoten Dime Food & Supplies. His voice burred in what she thought might be a French-Canadian accent.

"that's it" her voice told him, "thank you."

"WHAT?"

"Thank you."

She sat by the breathing lake and remembered that eating candy bars made noise too.

She briefly tried to whistle and remembered that she couldn't.

Her socks didn't make any noise. They took away the crackling of her ankles and the sound of her footsteps. Also, they got wet.

"NEED ANYTHING ELSE TODAY?"

"just the socks"

"THREE NINETY NINE."

"thank you."

"YOU STAYING AT THE MARINA DOWN BY WAWA? THE BIG GOOSE?"

"oh. no. the motel on aberdeen."

"CHECK YOUR BED."

"what?"

"FOR BUGS. MOTELS TEND TO HAVE CRITTERS AROUND HERE."

"will do."

"WELL YOU HAVE A GOOD DAY NOW."

"you too."

She checked for critters and found a spindle-legged spider spinning its web under the northwest leg of her rickety bed. She left him alone. On days she didn't walk to the store, she sat in the dark with a pillow over her head.

Loons, she decided, made stupid noises. Seagulls sounded like hunger. Crabs clattered in the rocks and fish flipped on the water like a slapstick sitcom. On flat days, the lake carried the sound of the marina across the water: bubbles of laughter, fishermen's hellos, children shrieking at the cold.


VIII: Vessels

The squeak of tomatoes made her nauseous. The snap of breaking apple skin scared her like a gunshot, but if she closed her eyes and prepared, the fizz-and-hiss felt like carbonated soda. Bread was like socks and meat was like lead. Distantly she considered the long and tragic life of her ham. She thought about praying to the pig gods and decided against it. Plastic water bottles were tiny artificial oceans that she lined up next to her bed, one by one, for seashells. One she reserved for pebbles, put the cap back on, and shook like a rainstick.


IX

She thought she lived in a quiet neighborhood four months ago, but someone had turned up the volume since then. The dogs, okay; the kids, okay; the honking and screeching of cars and geese, okay. But no one seemed to twitch at the constant electrical hum and the distant aggression of the city eating away at the coast like fungi.

She decided not to wince at the doorbell and did not wince at the doorbell. Hugs felt good and sounded like a heartbeat.

"What?" her mother said. "I can't hear you."

"I'm scared," she said. "And I missed you."

She lined up the plastic bottles next to her bed, full of silence and lake rocks. She closed her window hard against the suburban prickle and let the pebbles clatter through her hands and fall in silence to the hardwood floor.

Ellen Ellis is based in Chicago. This is her first published story.

Read her postcard.

Read Hannah Kauffman's 2½ Questions interview with Ellen.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Mike Bitzenhofer.

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