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We Won’t Be Quiet Anymore 
by Donna J. W. Munro 

“I had the dream again.”

He doesn’t look up from his phone, but I went on hoping he was listening. It was better than starting another fight.

“The one with black monoliths and cobbled alleys. Sasha ran through them, laughing and yelling for me to catch her. At first, I’m laughing too but I start falling further behind until I can’t see her. I can only hear her feet slapping the stones. I yell at her to stop.”

He swipes, ignoring me, focusing instead on whichever time killer he’s staring at.

If he’d reach out and touch me, or at least look up, I wouldn’t keep talking to fill the dead air between us.

“I call her name over and over. I can’t hear her footsteps over my breath. I search the line of monoliths and the cobblestone path stretching under my feet.”

He turns away, a wall of indifference.

The taste of the nightmare lingers in my sleep-fouled mouth, but his insistent ignoring me, pretending like Sasha didn’t exist, his silence are worse flavors to swallow. I reach for his shoulder to feel the warmth he doesn’t share with me anymore. Not since that terrible day.

He shudders when my fingers brush him. He jerks away, mumbling.

“Say something, Mark. She’s gone and you act like it’s my fault. I… I don’t think it was. Please? We used to be able to––”

When the phone rings, he gets up and leaves me there with my anxious words falling in puddles like tears. I hear him talking in the other room, making plans to meet someone, using the voice I used to hear when he was hiding something. I usually saw through it and knew what to say, but since Sasha he didn’t share anything with me.

It wasn’t my fault.

Anger lights in my gut, and I stomp over to him perched in our bed on the tangled sheets. His eyes skim across me as I come in hot.

“You can’t blame me for this… MARK.” I shove him to get a reaction. Any words, even angry ones, would be better than silence.

“Stop!” He screams, dropping the phone. He covers his ears, rocking and muttering about being sorry. About how much he misses…us.

When the memory floods back the sound that came from me is a freight train passing through flesh. I feel the punches crushing my ribs, the thin twisting wire around my throat just tight enough to bite. He’d stood in front of me wearing a black mask and gloves, sawing away at my fingers as I roared around the gag in my mouth.

Roaring now in the same agony as he writhes on the floor, blood dripping from his nose.

He told me who he was by how he moved, never saying a word. All I could do was mutter, “Why? Why?” when he cut out my tongue with his wire snips and then mewed as he cut away other strips of my skin.

“Sophia’s next,” he whispered as he sawed off my earlobe.

“Sophia!” I scream a concussive wave that knocks him back as I bury him in the bloody memory.

He’d dropped her on the floor in front of me. Me with no tongue to comfort her. Me with no fingers to touch her. He’d laughed as I begged without voice. He’d pushed her a little closer. Almost within my paddle-hands’ reach. She squealed and kicked under her father’s boot. He laughed!

Now, I laugh the same vicious booming laugh around him, shattering little bones in his ears, rattling his teeth. His eyes swam with the memory. Her little lungs rattled with wet gurgles. Her tiny hands thumped the floor. And the crunch, my screams, his laughs as her head collapsed under his boot.

“Sophia!” We both scream as I wrap around him.

Not my fault. Yours. Not my fault. Yours.

I plunge icy fingers into his body ripping away at his stolen life.

I scream until he lays in his own piss and blood.

“No more. Please.”

I’m wisping breeze across his broken ears, “There’s so much more. Just wait…”

He curls up, snot and tears mixing on his cheeks.

“Sophia’s so much bigger now. She won’t be quiet anymore.” I promise as the morning sun burns through my misty form.

I leave him writhing there with his worries.

Thinking death might be a release.

Either way, we’ll be waiting.

And so, so loud.

.

Fiction © Copyright Donna J. W. Munro
Image courtesy of Pexels.com

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!