Human to Canary
By AAnnR
Chapter 1:
Rain splattered on the windows of the large plane. Everything on the outside of the aircraft was gray and dark; but on the inside of the passenger transport location, it was packed to the brim with people. Humans of all races were sitting in row after row; with no seemingly category of one age either.
Loud, wailing babies sat on tired mothers' laps who were trying to calm them down. When one baby started crying another one began. It was a chain reaction. The only ones on the plane who were even remotely safe from the torturous sound were the elderly people. They had turned off their hearing aids and settled down for naps. One of these older citizens was now sitting next to me, snoring compulsively. His mouth was hanging open with drool sliding out between his widely spaced teeth. It was hard not
I also sat next to my father who was tersely tapping at his computer. Every so often he would grumble at it, repeatedly hit a wide key in the top right and corner, and then continue to type. My father was a tall scrawny man with a long thin nose with an equally thin face and lips. His eyes were narrow, black, and beady.
Needless to say, I sat in the middle of both of the men. At the moment I was trying to seem like I was sleeping, but it was hard. The loud noises around my berated my ear drums. Noise was never a good thing with me. My hearing was always so sensitive. I could hear a conversation that was being whispered on the other side of the classroom on good days. On other days I was as deaf as a rock. I suppose this was because of the line of work my father was in. There were times were I was needed in some of experiments. They would need a test subject and I would be forced to volunteer.
In one of the experiments they lab people had stuck needles in to my ears drums. A couple of minutes afterward my ears had begun to bleed. The liquid had caused my ears to overwork and move into overdrive, as I like to call it. This was the reaction, every once in a while, to the loud noises around me. If the noise in the plane didn't stop soon then I would be deaf for several weeks.
When I become deaf it's like my entire world is crushed into a tiny ball and pushed to the ground. I can't talk or walk correctly when it happens. My depth perception just disappears completely. It sucks.
XxXxXxX
My wishes were not granted. The noise only proved to worsen. Though I didn't bleed, I was still in massive agony; to the point were I wasn't able to walk straight for hours after we landed. My dad had to carry me to the taxi that was reserved for him.
So now I stood aimlessly behind my father as he argued with the desk clerk of a hotel in some foreign language. Before long some agreement was found and I was off following him down the hall. His long legs strode purposely down the hall while I, like a fish, had to run to keep up.
I watched the numbers on each of the doors we passed until we reached the end of the hall; 198. Glancing nervously at the number, I watched as my father took the white card out of its paper sleeve and briskly shoved it in to the card scanner. The light next to it flashed green allowing us to pass through the doorway. Inside was a small room with a large king sized bed and a couch.
I moved my eyes from the cute room to the sudden movements my father seemed to be making. He was slowly gesturing to one of the doors to my right. I reached my hand to it and opened the door. The door opened to reveal a bathroom. Turning back to my dad he handed me a notepad which had written on it in scraggily handwriting:
You go ahead and take a shower first. I need to make a phone call.
Nodding up to him, I walked into the bathroom. I closed and locked the door behind me before making my way to the shower. Stripping of my clothes, I turned the faucet to warm before sitting on the toilet.
I suppose I need to explain something to you about my dad. He was a hard, rough man who seldom had a soft spot for anyone other than my mother and I. Yet, after my mother died of lung cancer several years ago my father became a rather closed off man. No amount of begging, loving, tricking, bribing, or crying brought him back out of his shell once he completely closed you out. His trust of humans vanished, leaving me all alone most days.
I got to see him when he took me to work with him or when I helped him with his studies; but that was few and far between. I guess I looked too much like my mother; he never makes eye contact with me anymore.
The room had become beyond steamy when I came back from my thoughts. Quickly I changed the water a bit cooler before climbing in. The water ran down my back as I stood, one hand braced against the wall. I slowly relaxed as the warmth seeped into my tired muscles. For some reason my father thought it was necessary to walk to the farthest hotel from the airport as physically possible while still preferring to be within the legal distance of the city. While I hadn't packed much more than a backpack of clothes and other necessities, I was still tired from carrying my luggage across the city.
Believe it or not my father was absolutely paranoid. I had listened to him talk on the phone with a co-worker about the government tracking him were ever he went. Apparently, he thought that he had cracked open something that the United States wanted to keep on a down low. Though I had no idea what that had to do with being thousands of miles south of the USA, perhaps he thought that being in a country that was very friendly to our home was a good way to be covert.
I took the cake of soap from the wrapper and lathered some into my hands. Dragging the soap over my body, I watched as the soap left a white smear where ever I pressed it. Setting the soap on the ground I roughly swiped at the soap layered on my skin. The low water pressure didn't help much, but eventually I was able to remove the crappy soap. Turning the water off, I pulled by the curtain to be met by cool air. I hope that my father knows what he's doing.