Whispers of a Madman

I was raised by a madman, and I am no better for it.

He taught me to speak in Whispers, his own spoken so softly I had to watch the careful movement of his lips. 

“You don’t speak in Whispers to be heard,” he’d say, as his eyes traced the dust mites that lived in fractured shafts of lamplight. “Whispers open your ears.” 

No wonder I grew up a quiet child. 

Nothing came as easily to me as the Whispers. Not the characters that I was taught which came to me slowly, each new combination laboured over, my tongue twisting and rolling over sounds I had no notion could be captured in symbols. 

Some things never came to me at all. The angels painted in the margins of mother’s Bible appeared to me only when I thumbed through its gilded pages. 

“Looking for those angels again, love,” the madman would ask on good nights. His face would split open in a laugh that painted the air around us in joy. “If you’re not careful you’ll find one.”

He was like that, the madman. He carried around laughs that could paint and shouts that could break bones. I asked him once to teach me to speak in colour.

“That sound,” he said, his fingertips brushing the hollow of my throat, “the sound that starts in there, it's the only truth. If you mean it, that's when the colour comes.”

And then we howled. 

Broken glass has a way of demanding attention, and it followed him wherever we went. His hands were crisscrossed with evidence of shattered things, and often my little thumb traced his ropy imperfections, following the winding pathways past his knuckled mountain ranges until I had made it to his palm. Only when his hand would envelope mine, would I forget about the cartography of skin. 

 “Where does it take you?” I had asked, the pad of my thumb retracing my favourite route, face buried in the armpit of his coarse woolen jumper. 

“Back to you of course, love.” Woolen fiber tickled my gums as I buried my smile deeper. Back to me. Of course. 

He held me tighter on the nights we spoke in Whispers. Our heads would bend towards each other in a conspiratorial silence, and he’d wait a long time before saying anything at all. 

“You have to give your ears the chance to open properly. Acoustics reverberate long after the initiation of noise.” 

But I knew this to be true. Some words echoed in me still, though months removed from their sound waves and ports of origin. Back to you. 

I loved resting my forehead on his while we gave our ears time to understand the silences around us. I’d blink in rhythm with his breath, and knew each time my eyelashes tickled his forehead ’cause his lip would twitch. 

He had the ability to stop time with his silence. He’d inhale a breath and not exhale for a thousand years, or the rest of an afternoon. I watched him live countless lifetimes this way. Perhaps that was how he became mad, or wise. Perhaps that's how long it took for the echoes to stop. 

“An eternity in a minute. Did you feel that?” he’d grin. And though I didn’t, I nodded. 

The nights on which his boots were missing were ones I dreaded, ’cause I knew I’d have to expel the echoes on my own. Mother would hum, because he wouldn’t ask her to stop, and she’d smile over at me and ask for a story. 

“In mummy’s language, please.” She didn’t understand Whispers. The madman said her echoes were too loud, and that some people prefer their own company. 

“There’s truth in silence,” he’d say, watching mother hum in the same way he’d stare at gilded angels. 

It was always mother who came to my room each night bringing the moonlight with her. She’d smile, ensnaring the moon with her teeth and bending to give a kiss. 

One night when the madman’s boots were missing she lingered a moment longer, and I thought maybe I could see a trickle of cosmic glow leak from the corner of her eyes. 

“You have to piece people back together too, mindful of fractures and breaks. Yes?” she inquired urgently, as though if I disagreed I would nullify her statement. I nodded, and she scooped me up and kissed me. “You do it like this. Always like this.” And then she kissed me some more. And though I did not feel that I had any fractures or any breaks, I confirmed her healing. 

“Always like this,” I repeated. 

The madman sat in the corner, his swollen chest the only evidence of his power. I watched it fall as his eyes fluttered and time moved again as it did before. 

“You’ve never been the tough one to love,” he said, before closing his eyes to me and stopping time again. 

The madman’s boots had been gone four days before I began to wonder. Sometimes he’d slink back home, sometimes he barged through the door. But his boots were always back, resting on the mat mother insisted kept the sand from the floor. Because of his hands’ map, because it led to me, and I was right here. 

I could tell mother was worried too, because she didn’t hum, though he wasn’t home to tell her to stop. That night her truth was in her silence.

On the fifth day the wondering grew too heavy, and I asked mother where the madman was, in a Whisper, so I could prepare for her reply. 

“Oh honey, you know how he likes his walks with St. Peter.” 

It’s been years since the madman stopped time for me, and I regret now not asking him to teach me that one. I knew then what he meant, about the honesty of silence. But he failed to emphasis how long acoustics could reverberate. 

In echoes I still hear my madman. I don’t Whisper anymore.