( things )

[caipirinha]

Although it had been months since the telephone lines had been repaired, since satellites were launched once again into the black chasm of space – now terrifying, no longer an intrigue, no longer a goal upon mankind’s illustrious list of Things to Explore and Understand – it occurred to her that when she heard that jarring, unwieldy noise, not unlike what she would imagine as machine wailing for mercy, that she had never heard a telephone ring before that moment. It had made her jump half a foot in the air, with a kind of irrational fear that suddenly They had descended upon the Earth once again, out of nowhere, even though it was not a noise she could attribute to Them, associate with Them, and all the same, it had been the first thought to cross her mind. How strange, the suspicions of human minds in the wake of terrible events and great tragedies, that even the slightest unfamiliarity could strike such a coldness into a young woman’s heart, even if only for a moment. Once bitten, twice shy, as the old saying went, though an argument could certainly be made for thrice, nowadays. Perfectly still in the middle of the otherwise empty street, her brows suddenly pinched and the wide, surprised look in her eyes gave way instead to confused determination, lips pursing into a thin line as she tried to determine accurately where the sound was coming from. In the hazy blue of a midsummer twilight, Eva Llewellyn was uncomfortably aware that she ought to have returned home at least half an hour ago, but at the same time entirely of the opinion that half an hour more could hardly hurt an already broken promise. In that moment she was filled with an indignant flair; twenty four years old, and still she promised her mother every day that she would come home by eight in the evening. Not until she had found the ringing telephone, she decided. Wandering gingerly past the sleeping rows of thatched houses, overgrown with furling tendrils of greenery, as if the earth itself had risen up to claim as its own once again the ground upon which these houses were built, Eva discovered that the relentless, droning noise, was coming from what she supposed must have been a red telephone box, once upon a time, but its colour had faded, or been scratched and peeled away by weather and time. Standing by the open door to the box, Eva wondered why it was that she had even cared about the ringing, that she had willingly chosen to listen to its horrible racket. Her frown was now one of annoyance and discomfort, because the damned thing just kept going and going, and the sound was horrible, it was truly terrible, and Eva asked herself how in the world anyone had ever happily lived in a world where machines made sounds like that, and suddenly, with a frustrated huff, she turned smartly on her heel, and walked back down the street, past the empty houses, past the broken windows of a shop that said “Post Office” above, whatever that was, and left the ringing telephone. Moments of deep curiosity, she decided, were best not to be trusted. As the balmy twilight segued into night, the clear and cloudless sky became bright with stars, and they made Eva more nervous than the surrounding darkness ever could, and despite the warmth, she shivered after hazarding an upwards glance. The noise of the telephone still echoed in her ears, uncomfortably, and no matter how tunelessly and how actively she hummed, she could not make it go away. It was so unlike any sound she had ever known, and her leisurely paced stroll down the road that led from the abandoned hamlet, usually filled with peering at the world around her in the gathering dark, waiting for her eyes to adjust until she could see little, aimless things, like individual leaves on the low hanging branches of the trees, or the stones of the small, uneven wall that separated the road from the fields, was filled entirely with a blank expression and unseeing eyes, thinking only about the telephone, feet carrying her home of their own accord. It took no more than another twenty minutes for her brisk walk to bring her back to the familiar courtyard of the farmhouse, by which point she was almost an hour late, and her mother was on the verge of a messy emotional breakdown. “Eva! Eva, do you know what time it is? Do you know?!” “Five minutes to nine, Ma,” she answered, blandly. “Five minutes to nine! You promised to be home at eight, and here you are, swanning onto the scene at five! Minutes! To! Nine!” In her mind’s eye, Eva carefully punctuated each horrified word with its own personal exclamation mark to mimic her mother’s overindulgent staccato. “I swear down, my girl, if you ever pull a trick like that on me again, my heart won’t take it, then you’ll come back from your little strolls to find me dead as a doornail on this very floor.” “Ma, you’re barely a day over forty, and you’ve lived through Their coming, your heart’s perfectly fine,” Eva intoned, in a way that was both a compliment and a dismissal, because she knew exactly what her mother and her wild curls, her ferocious nut-brown eyes and wily hands were capable of just as much as she knew that her mother had a taste for theatrics and exaggerations. “Anyway, the day you let me go out and about with a rifle’s the day you think I have anything to be afraid of out there.” “Them!” Her mother laughed, raucous and unladylike, the way that Eva unashamedly loved, no matter the situation. “They are only as frightening as kittens when you have your own daughter on your mind. I’d go through Their coming all over again rather than see you come to any harm! It’s completely different, Eva, and you won’t even understand ‘til you’re a mother yourself.” “Christ, Ma, no harm but if having kids makes me as paranoid as you, I’m holding off as long as I can.” Temperance Llewellyn muttered a dark and highly blasphemous prayer for her daughter under her breath, and ushered her from the courtyard, past bemused hens and one equally bemused duck, into the earthy confines of the house. Somewhere in the stables a horse nickered and tapped its great hoof against the door of its stall, and instead of listening to the various ways in her mother was detailing how upset she would be if ever she lost her, Eva found herself thinking, once again, about noise. Hoof against stall was loud, harsh and broke the evening stillness like a knife through butter, and yet it did not affect her the way the telephone had. The shriek of the kettle on the hob – a new, exciting luxury, the reintroduction of gas and heating and, by extension, hot showers – caused her no bother either, nor did the distant scream of a lonely fox. Perhaps it was because these were sounds of nature, of impatient animals and steam desperately trying to escape its awkward little metal prison, and the telephone was the sound of something else, something that had been abandoned thirty years ago, when They came and started to tear everything apart. It was the sound of the past coming back to assume its rightful place in the present, though Eva was terribly dubious about anything being “rightful” nowadays.