We don’t get many visitors round these parts. We don’t take kindly to ’em either. It’s not so much that this is a one-horse town, we just got our own … Continue reading You Ain’t Welcome Here
Tag: story
Black Noise
I don’t hear things like you do. I hear them in colours.
It doesn’t quite translate the way you think. White noise tends to be a little pink. Finding white noise that is purely white is as difficult as finding untouched snow in a playground. There’s too much going on these days- too many radio frequencies, too many phone calls- it pollutes it all.
Water tends to speak in violet and not deep blue like you might think. Stormy seas shout to me in a loud, purple haze. Blue noise is low and kind of unsettling. You can find it in small, glowing lines around wires. Electric blue, you might say.
If the world is a canvas, it was first painted green. Not just in the trees and plants, but in the background noise too. Man-made noises throw a lot of red and brown in to the mix. They bleed together a lot and it can get messy. I used to walk in the woods a lot, away from the city, to try and find that undiluted green.
It’s the only place I’ve ever seen black noise. And I haven’t been back since.
I suppose I had always known that it must exist. For white noise to exist, black must also, and so turns the colour wheel. I just hadn’t given much thought to what that might actually mean.
I was alone in the forest, enjoying the green, when I started to notice it get darker. At first, it turned to a mossy green, but then it grew darker still- like a terrible mould had spread across the forest floor, climbing up tree trunks and turning everything to rot. I couldn’t hear anything different, but the green was fading.
And then I saw her.
She lay motionless and pale beneath a tree, deep cuts on her arms and chest, at least one of them fatal. Her mouth was open in a scream and black noise poured from it.
Silence.
Black silence, the true colour of a sound that would never be.
Usually, when I do the daily prompt I google the word for inspiration. Just to see if there’s a way of interpreting it that I hadn’t immediately thought of, or if something else sparks an idea. Today I found this cool Wikipedia page on the Colour of Noise and it was really interesting.
Via Daily Prompt: Noise
Before and After Me
A stack of photographs lie on the floor. I pick one up. A girl. She is smiling and she is happy. There is laughter in her eyes. She is loud and bold. She is bright and colourful. Vibrant.
She is me, but I hardly recognise her.
She is me.
Before.
I pick up the next one. There is a smile, but the eyes are different. She holds a knowledge in them now, a certainty that the world is little bit worse than she feared. Her light has tapered off.
She is me as I am now.
She is me.
After.
The Forest at the End of the World
We stood at the entrance to the Forest at the End of the World. The trees were impossibly tall and thick, but there was a clear path trodden through it. Exotic plants covered the forest floor in an array of colours unlike anything I had ever seen. It smelt different to other forests too and nothing like the humid, earthy smell of a jungle. It was far sweeter, a mixture of all the fruit juices in the world. However, not all of the flowers produced a scent. The breeze which rippled through the undergrowth was created by the flowers themselves. They breathed soft music into the air. It was barely audible, a quietly beautiful melody which every time I came close to picking up on would shift and change. Different harmonies and tunes intertwined with one another into something so beautiful it almost made me cry.
“Nature’s Song,” said our guide, seeing my expression. “Always changing, always playing. Never repeats itself.”
“Never?”I repeated. He shook his head. “Do they ever stop?”
“Aye…they will…and it’ll be a sad day for us all when they do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you hear how quiet they are?” he looked around sadly. “They never used to be that way. The more natural beauty we destroy, the quieter they get. The day these flowers stop singin’ will be judgement day for us all.”
