Flash Fiction
Silence
Rather than fill the air with pointless noise, Audrey stays quiet and saves her breath for worthier opponents. She can’t talk to her parents. She can’t talk to her two older siblings. No significant other to fawn over. She has very few authentic friendships. She is on her own.
There was always a massive abyss between her and her parents. She is on a cliff to one side. They are on the other side. Once upon a time, Audrey had hoped to bridge the abyss. But the abyss won’t stop widening.
Throughout her life, she was dangerously close to falling in. Audrey, however, adamantly refuses to fall into this abyss. She is sickened, inching along a precarious edge. She distances herself by whatever means available. Some means are more effective than others.
Audrey exists in a different sphere. To her skeptical parents, she perceives the world in incomprehensible terms. There is little to no understanding between them. What’s worse is there aren’t discussions regarding what it is understood and what isn’t. They can’t have substantial dialogues. The language barrier, among other things, blocks communication and closeness.
To the dismay of her family, she does unthinkable things that are relatively out there. But nothing too wild. Those days are over for now. She actively surrounds herself with people from different ethnic backgrounds and embraces diversity. She is limited in her options but does what she can to individuate.
To Audrey, small things speak volumes. Presentation always matters and, like it or not, is pretty critical in everyday life. She takes pride in her appearance. She is also quick to take offense. Taking every slight too personally, pain, shame, and embarrassment build up over time and become internalized. These have been incorporated into her inner wiring, making her too quiet and coming off as creepy to the wrong people, as a result.
She can’t seem to escape her problems. She thinks one is behind her and a new batch springs up. That’s how life should be. Living beings are meant to suffer. All the same, she, always anticipating helpless failure and destruction and envisioning a negative scheme of events, can hardly bear it. The smallest disappointments devastate her. Each and every loss crushes her.
Audrey lives in perpetual, cold, foggy darkness. Nothing she does ever seems to be adequate for herself or anyone else. Growing up, she was bullied, never quite fit in, and barely talked to people. Never enough. She’s still incomplete and disgustingly flawed. Cursed. Also known as the harbinger of bad luck. She feels grossness in her soul, sees it looming in people’s eyes at the sight or thought of her before they even unload the eternal criticism they have ready. There is always criticism from someone.
She forcibly goes on, one draining day after another. Having to maintain an urgent, composed, and stony demeanor masking an easily stressed, cozy interior, she is prone to sudden, unexpected anxiety attacks. In the few private safe spaces open to her, the icy walls she put up close in on her, sealing her in without hope of escape and the small availability of air within sucked away with each inhalation. Too soon, there won’t be any air left.
But her walls serve a purpose. Irrational or not, they insulate her from more pain and shame. She has no one and nothing else to protect her. Thus, she clings to her crumbling walls.
She grasps at what she can control which isn’t much. Audrey is an animal in a zoo. There is a minuscule range of possibilities open to her. Each day can be too predictable, so much like the next.
People come to see what a spectacle she is and leave after a time to seek amusement elsewhere. She doesn’t know how to act, look, and talk in such a world. She must be an iguana, regularly changing itself to match its environment. Also like an iguana, she is now indifferent to people, shutting herself off from all but a cherry-picked select group that has yet to materialize.
She, alone, ventures out one morning for an early hike in the woods after heavy rain from the previous two days. The rain makes her antsy. She anticipated mud but nothing this treacherous.
She reaches a particularly muddy stretch of trail. Audrey stumbles and falls into a pit of mud. She is caught in it. Each effort to get out lands her in deeper trouble. Crying out, her voice echoes and resounds through emptiness. She splashes about and pulls out her phone, dirtied from the damp soil, from her pocket and checks it. Of course, there isn’t any cell reception.
Later, she ends up trudging home with the lower half of her stiffened under hardening mud. There isn’t anyone home to welcome her. Next time, she is all too eager to wait it out after heavy rain.
She’s tired of misfortune and being looked upon with distasteful disdain. No, it’s not in her head. Will loneliness eat her alive? Audrey can run away but where can she go to stay? Can she run and eventually settle down or will she run for her whole life, looking for a perfect refuge that doesn’t exist?
No one can answer her. She can’t figure it out herself. For so many aspects of life, only time and patience can pave a clean path to clarity.
