Hi! I recently submitted a short fiction story in a contest and it won, it was so exciting! It is based on a mixture of my own experiences as well as of those people I love. So now, I hope that it touches and enlightens you as well.
Soundproofed
Gentle winds carried long strands of brown, kinky hair across a young girl’s face. Her nose crinkled and she brushed them back behind her ears. Alone, she sat in a distant corner of her school’s playground, her usual spot. She stopped fiddling with the flowers she picked and squinted toward the sky. She admired the sunshine’s warmth and smirked at the fun shapes of the slow clouds. Then she looked down at the other kids clowning and darting around. She wondered about their hardly ever closing mouths. She never understood why the adults in her life emphasized that strangeness. Once a week she would visit an older, heavier-set lady, always with bright-red painted lips, who would frustratingly manipulate her jaw and force her to breathe out strange vibration patterns, of which she had no concept of. To the average person, those odd moving mouths produced sound, language and conversation, joy and even pain – things most don’t usually consider to appreciate. But sound didn’t apply to her, she couldn’t receive it or make sense of it. She just wasn’t chosen to hear. She was soundproofed.
Many kids would approach her eagerly, their mouths rapidly creating things that would never reach her. She would look at them curiously and gesture them to write a note instead, for that was the only way she could communicate. But everyone resented handwriting class and writing was avoided by the kids. At least that’s what she liked to think. Often she watched the kids pull away discouraged, not sharing. She so desperately wanted to belong, to communicate with them as they did. But, when she tried to communicate like the red-lipped lady had taught her, most, even adults’ expressions would turn into one of disfavor. What came out of her mouth was unusual and hard to understand. People preferred to leave her alone because she was a weird kind of different, and were afraid to reach out into something unfamiliar. Perhaps they were afraid to do so because she reminded them of that they too could become “disabled” as they had called her. The little girl was constantly modified and encouraged to ignore her uniqueness for the bigger, more normal world. They thought what she had was a curse. But the little girl liked to challenge this idea, and she called it a gift, a gain rather than a loss.
At home, her parents struggled to accept her. They had never heard of this thing affecting their daughter, this terrible thing called deafness. Professionals insisted to her parents that their little girl be manipulated to be as like the mouth-users as possible. They even did a surgery to help her hear, but it failed. They genuinely thought this would be the best thing for her. They never thought to allow her to explore her own uniqueness, to explore her other abilities, to learn a signed language. For some reason, the lack of this one ability was unthinkable. Somehow they thought she couldn’t be productive as she already was. They were sad for her and considered her broken. People insulted her and made fun of her. They thought she was stupid, they reasoned a loss of hearing must equal a loss of intelligence. Because of this she suffered. But suffering, like rain to her flowers, causes growth.
She became used to that lonely corner of the playground. Every day she took in all the other senses she enjoyed – fragrances of mulch, fresh cut grass, and of soft petals of flowers she picked; the feeling of sunshine and wind through her tangled hair. Because she lacked one sense her other senses were sharpened. Her eyes were more aware and noticed subtle things most people overlooked. She was a whiz at search-word puzzles and had a photographic memory. She even enjoyed music by its vibrations. Skipping out on the experience of sound allowed her a more profound sense of awareness and appreciation. It allowed her to experience life more deeply. She was so young and naive, but at the same time the touch of ignorance she possessed gave her a wisdom that people ten times her age didn’t have. She learned that the absence of one sense not only elevated her remaining senses, but also her soul. The unfortunate thing was not that she was soundproofed, but that people often denied her, and themselves, of her alternate, wonderful world. That is what she wished they could understand.
soundproofed 