Audio/Video Club — A story about a school shooting

Merlin B. Love
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

The sound was so different than everything I’d ever heard in television or movies.

I anticipated a cinematic thunderclap; a cacophony of explosions accompanied with clicks and twangs.

The reality was a fiendishly loud series of pops. I’d say it was anti-climactic, from a purely acoustic point of view.

The theoretical limit to measurable sound is 194 decibels at an atmospheric pressure of one. That is to say that if you’re roughly at sea level, some noise producing event can only achieve that specific decibel level before the sound waves themselves alter the atmospheric pressure of the area. Imagine a sound so loud that the sound waves themselves move the air.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, in 1994, eight years before I was born, an Irish teacher named Annalisa Flanagan was recorded shouting at 121 decibels; a scream roughly as loud as a jet engine.

I heard my friend scream, but I don’t know how many decibels she reached. I do know that the sound of her body hitting the floor, and her silence that followed, felt immeasurably louder.

Atmospheric pressure is essential in measuring with an oscilloscope or meter because sound waves require some substance, in this case, air, to travel through and vibrate. In a vacuum, like outer space, the highway that sound waves need is unpaved, and thus creates no sound. In space, as they say, no one can hear you scream. That makes me wonder then if even the air molecules turned sentient for the briefest of moments and also scattered in fear?

Maybe that’s why it suddenly felt so silent — because for the briefest of moments a vacuum was created in the space she previously occupied.

The lower the frequency, the longer the sound wave generated; with bass waves measuring 20hz reaching nearly seventeen meters.

I wonder if some part of her scream, the lower part of her terrified register, the longest part of the wave, bridged the distance between us, connecting us for just a fraction of a second. Sound waves move fast at almost 343 meters-per-second, and that particular hallway in my school has been measured at 243 feet. That means some part of her scream reached me in less than a 1/50th of a second.

And If that sound wave was a tether from me to her, those pops as they went off could have connected me to him.

Him. The visible wind of a hurricane blowing in.

A vinyl record, the kind used for music, is produced by a diaphragm that senses pressure changes in the air and mechanically etches those changes into a medium like clay, wax, or vinyl. There is a theory in the study of Archeoacoustics that voices, music, and other sounds could have been captured in ancient objects through similar means; as maybe the ancient voice of an artist is captured in his clay medium as it spun on his table.

I wonder if the sound of those shots, those furious, terrifying pops, are captured in the walls of the hallway.

I wonder if they’ve been captured in me.

Perhaps, at some minuscule level, the sound waves have etched grooves into my bones, fracturing me at an imperceptible level.

To measure the performance and clarity of speakers and microphones, a room called an anechoic chamber is used. These rooms are built in such a way that sound waves can’t bounce off the walls or reverberate in any way. An anechoic chamber as an environment is so foreign to human ears that prolonged exposure can cause hallucinations and eventual madness.

If he and I were to stand one meter apart in such a room, he’d be able to hear my heart beat at a single decibel. He’d be able to look me in the eyes and listen to the heart I freely and fully gave to her and then listen to the echo of the hollowness that he left behind. He could stand one meter apart from other survivors and listen to their heartbeat, hearing the simple one-two beat of resolve and forgiveness. Resolve for living with the newly etched grooves in our lives, forgiveness because we’re better than him. Better. Stronger.

Echoic memories are moments we recall the sound of, though the physical sound wave has long since crashed through us. The ability of the human brain and how it recalls those sounds as attached to memories is why I can still hear her voice in my head. It’s the reason I can still hear the sounds of his trigger pulls. It’s the reason I can still hear the screams of my classmates and the syncopated cymbal crashing of people running in fear, slamming doors, and breaking glass.

A gunshot rings out between 140 to 190 decibels, with the rounds themselves leaving the barrel of a semi-automatic assault-style rifle at over twice the speed than the sound waves it creates as it fires.

She never heard that shot that killed her; the bullet tearing through her brain before the sound of the shot ever made it to her ear. Many others heard it, dying minutes to hours after their bodies were ripped apart by lead propelled by explosions and malice.

Those of us that survived will forever hear it. Etched into our bones like the wax for a record; etched permanently into our minds through the trickery of echoic memory.

The final shot, the last to ring out, seemed loudest to me. The bullet that took his own life thrown from the barrel pressed under his chin still hot from reaping the souls of twelve.

Silence followed.

A profound quiet stillness of no one moving, everyone holding their breath, all wedged into closets and corners. Maybe we had all, just for a moment stolen the air so that sound waves had nothing to travel through.

I held my breath until I forgot how to breathe.

I’ve since exhaled, heard the single decibel of my heartbeat again, and filled my life with purpose amplified by the memories of the fallen. It is through them that we are given the air that lets the sound waves of our raised voices reverberate through. They’ve been etched into the clay of the world, and we need only playback their sounds to learn from the past.

Author’s note: I wrote this for a flash fiction contest right after the Parkland Shooting. While it was rejected for the contest it’s still something I wanted to share. Gun violence is something that, as a parent, as a rational person, as an American, weighs heavy on my mind. If you want to get involved, please visit https://marchforourlives.com/.

The image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Attribution: Lorie Shaull

Merlin B. Love

Written by

Yes, it’s my real name. Fine purveyor of sarcasm, tales of woe, and the occasional poem.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade