The scream hadn't left him since the war.
Blackburn lay on his bed with the Seashells sitting in his ears, bubbling away, crashing against the walls of his mind. But no matter how big the waves, the scream was still there, poking and prodding and jutting just above the waves of music and babble.
He never signed up for the war.
He didn't even know what war was.
The politicians spoke of war on the walls. Slipped it in between their shiny words and made mention of it in victories and achievements. Then it was back on to the White Clown and the five-minute romance. War used to be just killing people, and people died all the time. Mr. Murray up the street did it by simply standing in the road. Some kids did it at the Fun Parks in a blaze of neon lights. Some woman did it in a blaze of fire and burned with her books.
Death was all too common in this world.
Blackburn rolled over and tried to push the thought away, cram it under his bed and stuff it between his dirty laundry. He never had these thoughts before the war! Not until that infinite scream burrowed into his brain like a parasite and the bombs sent shock waves through his bones. No longer did his thoughts flake away, brittle and bland, like the ashes left in his wall incinerator, all sinew and no meat. Now he could hold onto a thought for hours into the night, dissecting it and turning it over and baking it and letting it simmer on his tongue, tasting all the seasonings and savoring the flavor. His thoughts didn't care about frivolous things like sleep.
Blackburn turned the knob on his Seashells higher and higher until it could go no more. The scream picked and prodded at his skull, a surgeon's blade searching for disease, wrapped up water-proof tight so no dribbles of sound could escape, his ears ringing ringing ringing. Blackburn could no longer bear it. With a roar he ripped the Seashells out of his ears and sat on the edge of his bed, panting, trying to fill up his oxygen-starved lungs.
A slight whirring sound came from the parlor, like a beetle stretching its wings. The family began to wake up.
A speeding train of sound hit him, sending him reeling back on the bed as explosions and laughter and violent trombones and needling flutes and crashing drums pummeled him. His sister shouted in delight and welcomed the family back, her frenzied, excited chatter the whistle of bombs before they dropped.
Seeing no way to combat the parlor walls, Blackburn lumbered to his feet and into the kitchen and stared at the jutting fourth parlor wall. His sister and father were in there, watching in merry delight as the colors painted pretty pictures behind their eyelids and the family appealed to their every need.
Blackburn hadn't joined them since the war.
Two weeks, the officials said when Blackburn received his draft notice. Two weeks, the family repeated, little bird tweets and murmurs. The war remained a thought of a thought, buried beneath the neon lights of the parlor.
Then Blackburn had to leave. To leave the four walls of the parlor and step out into the wide wide world with nothing but a scrap of paper in his hand to guide him. He remembered standing in the entry, the front door wide open and beckoning. His father and sister scurried out of their burrow in the parlor, gave him a quick hug, and scurried back, afraid of the hawks and snakes that awaited them outside.
His mother had gone driving. His mother was always gone driving.
Blackburn remembered standing there, standing with his arms still outstretched, waiting for affection that would never come. He remembered how his hands started to shake, how his legs wavered beneath him, and how the ugly monster called fear poked its head up and sniffed around. Its fur choked up his throat and its claws squeezed his heart until he could barely breathe. He wanted to run into the parlor, wrap himself up in the blanket of colors and lights and fakery. That's what scared him the most.
This was all too real.
And it grew more and more and more and more real with every trudging step he took into the war. Blackburn did not get assigned to fly the jets, safe and sound in the warehouse behind the screens as he used a remote control to pilot the metal skinned beasts. He did not get to watch the war filtered through the cameras and positive messages and gentle reassurances. No, Blackburn was assigned to clean-up crew. Down on the ground, shuffling among the bombed-out cities, white ghosts wandering through a brand-new graveyard.
Blackburn got to see the war up close.
Smell the smoke and dust and despair as it drifted into his mouth and eyes, hear the cries and wails and screeches of the unlucky survivors. See the desolation, the buildings crumbled to powder-piles of sugar and snow and the bodies twisted and smashed like bugs with their insides dripping and their wings crunched under rubble.
Every time Blackburn entered the crumbled world of war and stood on a pile of dandruff-dust debris and stared around him, he felt it. He felt the scream building up inside him, clawing its way out of his chest and his heart ached. Ached enough that he fell to his knees and crumpled, a match burnt and breaking black, weeping.
The scream never left.
And when he came home and saw his family, stick thin and brittle enough to break in a high wind, heard them chattering and screeching with laughter, their lips pulled too far back and their eyes wide, he felt sick.
Now as he stared at the fourth parlor wall, that sickness rose up in him again and the scream beat his ears. Blackburn had tried letting the scream out, opening his mouth as far as he could until his lips cracked, pounding at his chest and pulling so hard that tears rolled down his face.
Yet no sound escaped. The scream sat inside him, a caged beast that roared to be let out and Blackburn could never find the key to open its prison doors. Blackburn closed his eyes and grimaced.
"Douglas, come watch. The White Clown is on. Douglas? Did you hear me? The White Clown, hurry, hurry you'll miss it. Douglas?"
Blackburn opened his eyes. His sister stood at the parlor door, squinting at him. "Come on, then," she said.
Maybe the parlor walls would block the scream out, if only for a minute. Blackburn stepped into the parlor with his sister and the tornado of color and light sucked his breath away. He blinked at the blaring screen and tried to focus.
Two clowns rode on unicycles, hitting each other in the head with wooden clubs. With each smack of the club, the clown's face would change, from actress to actor to politician to cartoon character, so fast and so quick the faces were barely recognizable. His father laughed on the floor and his sister giggled with glee.
"Look Doug!" she said. "Isn't it pretty?"
Blackburn watched in horror as the clowns hit harder and harder until one of their heads flew off and tumbled to the ground like a flower petal. The other clown cackled and rode over the head and cackled harder as the skull crunched and the headless clown fell off his unicycle.
Then fireworks exploded in the room and the clowns disappeared, to make way for a car race. The cars smashed into each other, bodies flying out as if a child were flinging away her unwanted dolls. Blackburn's sister chuckled and pointed to one car that looked like a curled up fist of metal.
"That man's head is all funny!"
Blackburn pressed his hands to his eyes and groaned as the war marched into his head, the memories of bodies strewn about like garbage, the smell of burned flesh and-
"Doug!" His sister ripped his hands from his face and Blackburn stared straight into the eyes of a shark. The shark darted for a person, a person swimming away and the shark ate them in a single gulp and licked its lips.
"Watch, Doug!" the sister exclaimed. "Look! The shark eats just like us!"
"We don't eat people," Blackburn said in a low voice.
"It's only pretend," his father said on the floor, his voice drifting away as if pulled along by the current made by the walls.
"Of course not, silly! Why would we— This show is my favorite!" The sister started trembling all over and her eyes held a maniacal sheen.
At the first gunshot, Blackburn could take it no longer. With a yell (almost a scream, almost) he lunged to the switch and pulled it down with such forcefulness he wondered if he broke it.
The room died down, the color swirled away as if sucked down a drain. Blackburn stared at his family who stared at the blank walls.
"What did you do!" the sister cried. She dashed to a wall and ran her fingers over the emptiness.
"Doug," his father said. "Turn it back on."
"No." Blackburn shook, his lungs heaving.
"Why not!?" the sister wailed. "It was my favorite show!"
Blackburn could find no words to explain himself. He gaped at the room, the empty walls, the war staining the edges of his vision, dusty echoes blowing in his ears.
His sister reached over Blackburn and flipped the walls back on. She oohed and awed at the firework show, the colors reflecting back on her pale skin and burning up her eyes, her mouth gaping as she sucked the colors in, teeth dowsed in the brightest of reds and the darkest of blues. In that moment, Blackburn did not see his sister. All he could see was a mess of color born from the walls.
Blackburn pressed his hands to his ears as the scream pushed him to his knees and sent him shaking all over and his nails dug into his scalp and his mouth opened but no sound came. Just opened and pleaded to be filled.
"Doug!" His sister became a banshee, screeching for all she was worth. "Look at the walls, Doug! Look at them!" Her flaking, knobby fingers curled around his wrists and pulled but her arms were thin and Blackburn's had just been through a war, it was no contest. Still, the sister tugged and tugged. Blackburn squeezed his eyes shut.
"Doug! Douglas, look! Douglas! Look now, or you'll miss it! Watch it with me, Doug! You'll miss it! Doug!"
Gunshots and explosions broke out of the walls, the rata-tat-tat of bullets and whoosh of mushroom clouds toppling over and Blackburn could almost smell the kerosene, the gunpowder, and the smoke.
"Doug! Watch!" The sister found strength and toppled Blackburn to the ground. His eyes flew open and she grabbed his face and held it up at the walls, grinning at the bombs and the guns and the fire and the destruction.
The walls focused on a man, cowering in a ditch, laughing as he aimed his gun and fired. Laughing as rain-drop bullets attacked him. Laughing as the world burned around him.
And that's when Blackburn screamed.
And he kept screaming and kept screaming even as his lungs longed for breath and his throat filled with blood and his mouth dried up. He kept screaming as men with tubes picked him up and carried him outside. He kept screaming as they drove him away, as his family watched him leave, terrified rabbits not daring to leave their home. He screamed as the men with tubes put him to sleep with their medicines and even then, Blackburn didn't know if he stopped.
When he got home, the father and sister wouldn't let him in the parlor. They refused to step foot outside of its sparkling walls. Crumpled tubes extended out the window and onto the sidewalk, where delivery men would slide plastic cartons of food into its maw. Toiletries were taken care of in a similar fashion. For all Blackburn knew, the walls could have absorbed them both.
The scream still hadn't left, but it was quieter now. It sat in his mind and chest, boiling and bubbling. It gripped Blackburn with cruel claws and filled him with anger.
His mother had gone driving. His mother was always gone driving.
Blackburn wondered if he was the only one who noticed that she had not been back for a month. He wondered where she went. If she was dead. If she married someone else. If she ever existed at all.
Blackburn did a lot of wondering now, as he walked up and down the lamp-lit streets at night. The yell inside of him burned his blood and churned thunder clouds in his chest, forcing him to his feet and out the door.
The world was softer in the dark, as if the fabric of the air was a well-worn shirt with the corners rubbed down to fuzz. The moon cast gentle light onto the rubber asphalt and the wind whispered against the stars. In those quiet moments, Blackburn discovered a world that could never be depicted on the parlor walls. No pixel could capture the color of dandelion leaves against a bleeding sunset. No politician could quite explain the somber emotion that crossed over Blackburn's chest as he studied the darkness between the stars.
He crouched down and studied a spider suspended between blades of grass. Silver thread floated around its head like a halo: the beginnings of a web. He had forgotten that spiders did that. Wasn't it to catch their food? Blackburn brushed his hands in the grass and smiled. He never knew it could be so soft.
"Lovely night, isn't it?"
Blackburn jumped and looked up. A man stood at his side, old and worn, grinning like a child.
"Yes," Blackburn said. "It is."
The man knelt beside Blackburn. "I see you've found an Araneus gemmoides."
"I thought it was a spider."
The man laughed and the stars laughed with him. "It is. Its Latin name, however, is Araneus gemmoides."
"That's pretty." Blackburn continued to watch the spider, dew soaking into his shoes. "How did you know that?"
"I used to study Latin names," the man said. "Before they closed the universities."
"You were a professor?"
"Yes. And you were a soldier."
Blackburn's eyes dropped to his feet. "How did you know?"
"Little things, little things." The man smiled and rubbed his chin. "There are a lot of little things to notice."
"There are," Blackburn said. He glanced back at the spider. "I'm just now starting to see them."
"New eyes from the war, eh?"
"Something like that."
The man spread his arm out in front of him, sweeping his hand in the night sky as if he were painting the universe. "Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them, Cannon in front of them, Volleyed and thunder; Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the Jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell, Rode the six hundred."
Blackburn stared at the man, wonder streaking across his eyes. "Is that from a… a book? Did a book say that?"
"A poem. By Lord Tennyson."
"Is that your name?"
The man laughed. "Of course not! I'm Baker, George Baker. I'm a spokesperson for Tennyson, who died centuries ago."
"But did he go to war because that's exactly…" Blackburn paused. "Exactly what it was like."
"That's what books and poems do," the man said. "They take our emotions and put them into words. They connect everything in the universe. They make butterfly wings and snowfall easy to understand while forcing us to question our very names. They make the world seem reasonable while allowing us to wonder at the beauty of it all." His face turned up to the stars. "Books give voices to the voiceless, life to those on the brink of death, a cure to the sick, and can even bring sight to the blind. Books are healers, you know." The man pressed his finger into Blackburn's chest. "They can even heal you."
"Is there more?" Blackburn asked, breathless.
And so Blackburn learned about the courageous six hundred riding into the Valley of Death, about sacrifice and love, about fighting and bravery. As the sun spilled over the horizon and the gentle night wore away, Blackburn realized.
The scream was gone.