"Erasure" by Jessica Hood

Erasure

by Jessica Hood 

It was silent. 

And that silence had weight, had substance—a living thing that grew fat on absence. It was not the gentle cessation of noise that comes with evening, not the soft hush of snow falling. This was the complete evacuation of sound itself—a hollow pressing against her ears until the drums within them sang their own phantom frequencies. The silence possessed weight, substance; it pooled in the curves of her skull like mercury, seeping through the fissures of thought. Through lanes that might have been streets once, she moved—or perhaps the world moved around her while she remained fixed, a pin through a turning map. The asphalt beneath her feet had given way to something organic in its decay, splitting along seams that resembled the lines of a palm, while pale weeds emerged like the hands of the drowned reaching up from beneath. Questions rose in her mind—gossamer things, tissue-thin: where, how far, how long? But the silence was jealous of even these wisps of cognition, folding them back into itself, smoothing them into nothing, until only the walking remained. The air around her had forgotten how to move. Reality itself seemed to hold its breath, as if she carried within her some contagion of quietude that seeped outward in invisible rings, touching the husks of automobiles, the blind mouths of doorways, the windows that had become dark mirrors reflecting only the absence of reflection. And still, from somewhere beneath the weight of it all, thoughts would surface—pale fish rising through black water. Still, something stirred beneath. Memories, perhaps, though she could no longer decode their language, could not say what these flickering images had once meant to the person she might have been. 

They came in colorful bursts, blipping into existence just as fast as they burned out. A red balloon ascending through pewter sky, its string a delicate tether to nowhere. A child in yellow dress, eyes the color of forgotten summers, small hands reaching. Chrysanthemums of light bursting against darkness, gold bleeding into silver. Virgin snow holding light like a secret. A bearded man cradling amber glass, the liquid within catching fire. But the silence was patient, erosive. It wore these images smooth, dissolved their edges until they became suggestions of themselves, then less than that. 

So she walked. 

The visions rose again, their colors now watercolor-pale, bleeding at the edges. White fabric dancing with wind, lace lifting like wings. The antiseptic brightness of a room and the cry of new life. Rain weeping down stone, a name carved deep. Petals falling from a bouquet, each one a small goodbye. The moth-wing touch of lips meeting. These too liquefied, running together like wet paint, pooling briefly before the silence absorbed them, leaving only the faintest stain on consciousness. 

The images quickened now, urgent as a dying heart. Cold hands wrapped around a warm coffee mug, steam rising. A baby smiling, her sleepy eyes full of love, tiny fist curled. The ebb and flow of the ocean, waves pulling back and rushing forward. Fireflies on a summer evening, blinking in and out of existence. A bloodstain glistening on the pale carpet, spreading outward in a perfect circle. Wind teasing hair, strands dancing. A bearded man smiling, eyes crinkling at the corners. 

The silence had grown glutinous, adhering to everything, muffling even these persistent fragments. They flickered now through increasing distance, caught in the amber of nothingness that filled her skull. Thunder bellowing overhead, shaking the ground. The small embrace of a child, arms barely reaching around. Rose petals on the floor, scattered and crushed. The cold glint of a gun's barrel, metal catching red light. Slow dancing in the rain, clothes soaking through. A puppy with a red ribbon around its neck, tail wagging. Blood dripping from a limp arm, each drop marking time. A brown teddy bear, one button eye missing. A bearded man lying on a couch, eyes open, staring at nothing.  

She walked without stopping, the images falling away into a void of nothingness that filled her head, expanding with each step. But still, they persisted, despite the suffocating blankness that pushed out, consuming, filling itself with the mind-colors, digesting them into gray. 

The pictures behind her lids grew thin as old cloth. The nothing wrapped around them with tender violence, drawing them down into itself, savoring their dissolution. A dog. Flowers. Unbridled joy. A child's grief. Shattered lenses. Stars. A sound that tore the throat. A spark of sound and metal. Heat. Water from the sky. Hands painted crimson. Frames holding worlds. The hollow ache of need.  

Need. 

The word became flesh, became the only truth. There was nothing else—only silence and hunger and void, a trinity of absence. She had become appetite itself, had become the soundlessness, had become the nothing that swallowed. She was the emptiness seeking to be filled, the filling that created only greater emptiness. An ouroboros of consumption that fed on itself eternally. 

So she moved through the world, and she consumed, and with each consumption the void dilated, reaching further into the abandoned world that waited, patient as silence, to be devoured. 

She was hunger wearing the costume of a woman. She was silence shaped like flesh. She was the void walking. 

Walking.  

Walking.

Walking.