Dolores was the last person anyone would have expected to fall victim to hearing loss.

With her gift, she could literally hear a pin drop a mile away. She could hear a buzzing bumblebee. She could hear the faintest whisper of a breeze. She could hear other people's breathing and heartbeats. That's how she found out she was pregnant for the first time—she heard the tiny heartbeat of the baby inside her before any other signs appeared. She listened to the heartbeats of all of her children. After they were born, she had to listen to them cry also. During those times, she was thankful for her soft, red, noise-canceling earmuffs.

One would think that Dolores would go through life being able to hear every single sound in the village, even the unpleasant ones. She herself thought that. But life is unfair sometimes.

Dolores was in her sixties when she first got the feeling that something was wrong. She had a high-pitched ringing in her ears that wouldn't go away. It was faint at first, so faint that she thought she was imagining it. But as weeks passed, it grew louder. The fact that it wasn't a noise she could turn off, that it was inside her own head, almost drove her mad.

The second sign that something was amiss was when she had to ask Mariano to repeat himself. The room may have been noisy, but Dolores had always been able to hear every sound all at once and clearly, even in a house full of people. The look on her husband's face told Dolores he was concerned for her as well.

They ruled out the possibility of an ear infection. Dolores didn't have a fever or ear pain, except for the pain that came whenever she heard a sudden loud sound. There was only one other explanation: as Dolores was getting older, she was losing her hearing.

It had happened to other elderly villagers before. When Julieta had been alive, they had come to her hoping her cooking could cure them. Although Julieta's food could heal anything from broken bones to diseases, her magic was powerless against deafness. It was an irreversible ramification of old age. Dolores realized this was her situation now. Looking back, she was amazed that she hadn't lost her hearing before this point.

With her gift amplifying every noise throughout her life, it was as if she heard every sound ten times louder than it actually was. A person speaking at a normal volume sounded like they were shouting, and when they actually shouted, it was unbearable to the point of causing her pain. Dolores's family had been sensitive to this ever since she turned five and received her gift. They were careful to keep their voices low, even when they were upset and tempted to yell. Sometimes all the noisy stimuli gave Dolores headaches that kept her in bed in her soundproof room for a few days. When Dolores felt one of these migraines coming on, she communicated by sign language, too exhausted, sick, and stressed to speak.

All of the Madrigals had learned sign language so they could respect Dolores when she wished for silence. But now it would be the only way they could communicate with her at all. Dolores tried to learn to read lips, but it was hard to make out exactly what people were saying all the time. She stuck with sign language, but she would also speak her words while she signed them, even when she could no longer hear her own voice. Even when she could no longer hear her husband's voice or the voices of her children and grandchildren, she kept saying her words out loud. A part of her was glad that she could speak at a normal volume without hurting her own ears, but she missed hearing the sounds of the world—even the loud ones.

Dolores never realized what a gift it truly is to be able to hear at all—until now. The cruel irony of her fate struck her like a slap in the face. She, the one with the gift of super hearing, had lost the use of her ears. Her world was as silent as a stone.

In the evenings, Mariano used to play his tiple and sing for just the two of them. Now his fingers were too arthritic to pluck the instrument's delicate strings, and Dolores wasn't able to hear any music. But she had always been sensitive to vibrations, and she didn't need her ears to detect those. She spent these evenings in the twilight of her life with her head laid on Mariano's chest and her fingers gently touching his throat, feeling the rumbling of his voice as he sang words that were lost to the air.

translations:

tiple—a 12-stringed guitar played in Colombia