Couldn't Wash the Echoes Out

The howling of wolves never calmed her at night, because before their growls and warbles came their screaming. Worse than any wound she could possibly bear, than any battle beneath the lush viridian canopies she could ever fight. Many of their guests would set up camp in a specific spot, at the foot of a particular tree, under a certain rocky overhang they could not help but to gravitate towards, and wait the sunlight out. She would occasionally tread over half-chewed books, find their pages tattered, soiled and scattered like leaves across the forest floor as she regulated the woodland. Glimpses of those dismembered sentences burrowed into the forefront of her memory and prompted her to wonder for the rest of the night just how many of those discarded novels were actually thumbed through, of how their owners could sit so calmly and wait for their torturer to take her place in the sky, if they were calm at all.

In that first hour of night, the atmosphere of their forest transformed, much like its visitors, into something that belonged locked inside a torture chamber. To call the collection of cries a chorus would have been generous, if not utterly heartless. There was nothing harmonious about the noises that erupted when all corners of the forest fell dark. Some were hastened by breathing or sobs, while others were so shrill and clear she halted in her stride as discomfort raked up her vertebrae, paralysed until the echoes were lost beneath the cover of fresh cries. In that first hour they would all shriek and screech until their vocal cords were stretched so far beyond their original shape that screams hitched in transforming throats and the ability to express but a fraction of their unfathomable pain was completely robbed from them. It was this knowledge that sullied the silence in the forest and tarnished the tranquillity brought about by its crisp fresh air that, in truth, had lasted all of a few weeks when she and Hannelore first descended upon the woods with a view to discovering its every surprise.

And when their torturer retreated under the horizon and the sun returned to the sky, the cacophony stayed with Fianna like her shadow. It kept her awake in the morning. It would echo between her ears as she laid her head against her pillow, where the backs of her eyes became walls on which moments were projected. Split second glimpses of naked bodies rocking themselves back and forth between the silhouettes of tree trunks taunted her until she imagined the inevitable moment she would find herself standing before a plot of earth shredded apart by what were clearly human fingertips, a thought far too unsettling to sleep upon.

She wandered through the morning and trudged through the afternoon until her body finally lost the will to soldier on midway through an episode of Jonathon Creek, or perhaps at the start of a new paragraph in a book that would find itself on the floor when her arm slid off the edge of the sofa, and would eventually be relocated to the coffee table at the same time a blanket would be cast over its reader’s long legs that would eventually be rearranged.

Because Hannelore would be damned if the lanky bitch took up the whole sofa just because she couldn’t sleep in her own bed.