I moved, there was a twitch of a sound. I couldn't handle this. Another crack. Creak. Whip. The wind stirs through the nerves in my brain. Fingers tapping. My dog talking. Sisters croaking about the universe and the planetary alignment. I didn't care. Noises needed to be stopped. My head was brimming full of sounds and there was nothing I could do to make these sonorous demons stop.
It's been years. Too many years. They take good care of me. My family is an aged photograph, brown, satin, warm. Their eyes were full of remorse for having me and letting me succumb to my insanity.
Mom never was around. The phone demanded her to go and to become a slave to a corporate entity. Dad slaved over the kitchen and cleaning, then settled on the couch with a Keystone Light staring fixedly at the television, not understand what anyone was saying or what was happening, but it was an escape and it was all he could stand right now.
Noise drifted off in the hallways. I was convinced my dog, whom I named Dukey at the age of four with my muddy mouth and flaming red hair that was exposed and turned to gradients. My parents told me Dukey wasn't a sentient being like us. I disagreed, and he was my only friend. My only, sad, pathetic friend who was slowly becoming distant and being drained from what was explained by the vet as lymph nodes. Noises kept going. I heard the cracks of perfectionism, completeness, and wholeness creasing through my fingers and having me ask Them so many questions. Colorful candies didn't help, the constant talking to this giant white wall with a mustache and a clock embroidered on its chest, to keep track of how much time I could confess to it my secrets. There wasn't much telling it, other than the explosion of sounds I heard everyday. I moved, another crack, another strain in time and space. My sisters knew a little about psychology and thought I needed to see a specialist, because my ideas about the sounds pervading and hurting us slowly was "illogical and irrational". They saw numbers and strange symbols as the only answers to their questions and not at all some divine being set to punish me. Dukey died in the winter, I still heard him, through the snow that fell like tears in the air. I tasted them. There was a sound, and I was an animal like Dukey. I clenched my teeth, covered myself in the cold sheets, muttering and whispering how these things could happen. My sisters kept trying to find a numerical equation to heal me, a chemical formula, but none of that had worked and I doubt it ever will at this point.
Even as I tell you this story that will be unreached by those who would truly understand, I heard cracks and stains and society and the flesh of our universe fall apart and sink further into these fathomless, non-existential depths of regret, depravity, and forsaking eyes of the deities that I saw every night when I turned over from my army cot and away from the stars that once guided me away from these cells and chemical chastisements. My last name, christened so long ago for a reason I can't figure out and until then had never cared to figure out as I never cared about anything in life, but this sonorous disruption of chaos, reflected who I was, what I would be in the coming years. A guinea pig struck with needle fingers from Them and tasting the poisons of their special President Day's candy that I thought was a good idea of the time. It wasn't. I was suffering, and I rarely left my perch of the army cot, staring at the stars from outside my window, the idle scratches on the ceiling. A long plastic tube was attached to me. I never had the strength to go to the bathroom. My old self would laugh at that, but until he experienced these screams and cracks and whips in my head as if it was a funnel that eventually led to Hell, the toilet would seem a sanctuary. There was the mirror in the distance in the bathroom, and I wanted it to see any semblance of what I was. Maybe they hid this from me because I wasn't the young, rude and arrogant boy I once was. A semblance of humanity formed through the madness, as it did to most people, but I counted the hours when my family would return from their vacation and I soon lost count. Math never was a specialty of mine, but nothing ever really was.
Plucking the candy from their knived fingers like an emaciated pigeon, I waited for the noise to stop, to come home, to see Dukey and mom and dad and my sisters who led me to being imprisoned. It kept going. I dared not move just to hear the sound again.
Drips from my IV kept seeping into my body, keeping me alive so I could see them again. Every sound it breathed, however, was a crack, another fragment in my still animation. Whip Crack...Whip Crack...Whip Crack...
I wasn't entertained by the notion of suicide. At the time, it didn't seem like a bad idea, but it was just better to sleep and breathe and eat and shit and piss and wait for them to come back. Even if I heard the sounds for the rest of my life, when another undesirable season would elapse...