Soundings

By Jacqueline Modungo

Is this tranquility?

I laughed to myself through the reverberations in a way that no one could hear me, and for a few minutes I stopped believing there was always someone on the outskirts of my field of vision. There is something so poisoning about sound, about how you don’t hear it, about how you taste it, about how it takes you all at once. And so I save it for a rainy day. It was November when I reconvened, or at the very least, it was one of the -embers. Someone kept putting back the leaves so that we could watch them fall. They must have heard me complain that it was all over too soon. I didn’t question the lack of need for a jacket, but there were times when I almost wanted to pull the cold back over myself so that I had a reason to withdraw. But there I was, on who knows how many of the last adirondack afternoons when the sun hadn’t been cut from its string, waiting for the floor to fall through.