What’s That Sound?
- …Wait. What’s that sound?
- What could it be?
- A spider, creeping in the corner of your bathroom?
- A car backfiring?
- A faucet dripping forever, to infinity?
- Wait; what is that sound?
- It’s so insistent, so persistent.
- …It is the relentless beating of that tell-tale heart?
- Your girlfriend/boyfriend, groaning stupidly in their sleep?
- The sound of your impending doom?
- The ongoing roar of the ocean, fifteen city blocks away?
- A cat?
- The sound of a needle scratching off a record, but in, like, a negative inverse universe, so that it’s more like the sound of needle being applied to a record, but in inverse, so that it’s the rewind of a record scratching to nothingness?
- Does that even make sense?
- Water dripping down a cord?
- A beetle scratching?
- O, is it the sound of that Shakespearean Rag — so elegant, so intelligent?
- Children playing at a far-away playground?
- The untiring lonesome rattling cough of a dying man?
- An engine revving?
- If you could put the sound of the sound into words, how would that sound?
- Something like this: “sound, mystery — pause — that sound… again.”
- A tribal war-cry?
- A shout in the street?
- The antique ringing of a doorbell?
- A yawn, and then an answering yawing?
- The even more antique cry of an ice-cream truck, blocks and blocks away?
- Or is the sound just an auditory hallucination, the sound of you having been awake for far too many hours?
- The sound of a paper-towel-less hands-free hand-drier, you know the kind, the kind with the large square chrome metal button, being turned on in a bathroom?
- The sound of time’s wingéd chariot, closely approaching, right behind you?
- What is going on?
- What is happening?
- What is that insistent sound, drumming, thrumming?
- The sound of the grass growing?
- The sound of a rose petal falling?
- A sound so low that if you could understand it, it would be like a wave crashing, and you would expire from the knowledge of the everything on the other side of the nothing that you always think that you never hear?
- A cricket?
- A rickety lawnmower?
- The sound of a rattle, and a grin spread ear to ear?
- The sound of lonesome longing weeping, down by the pier?
- What, what?
- What is it?
- The sound of a single tear?
- What is that sound, drumming, drumming, like a distant army beginning to array itself for battle — or is it just the sound of your lover’s heart?
- A sound, or a murmur, or a nothing?
- If you could understand the sound, then you could understand everything now.
- Too late; but you could understand it all.
- But instead of understanding, you have a lack of understanding.
- A lack, which is like the lack produced by the sound of the sound.
- You understand nothing.
- Very little, in fact.
- …And maybe that’s all for the best.
