all the world's a stage and I'm here to break legs

I think there’s an alarm sounding quietly in the next room. It’s for the tea, if it’s for anything. Hurry: bitter soon. Better when spicy, polished by the vanilla.

No sound follows the silencing. A long subsonic groan in the curve of time marks its passage. I rise slowly, from my back to my hip to haunches to heels to height, and stretch my fingers. It’s six eleven in the morning. My toes curl on carpet of middling thickness. There’s a click from somewhere.

The next room has no door or window into mine. I hear rumbles, snaps, hums, beeps, alarms from it, but rarely (and never) voices. Sometimes I lay my ear against it, but not now. I pull on clothes and go about my day.

When my day is over and I’ve returned to my room, I undress again. There’s an irregular rumbling coming from the next room. It flows and ebbs, in its spring cacophonous and in its neap a whisper. The timbre is of wind on sky. Another click, maybe from the next room or maybe from elsewhere, marks or accompanies the rumble’s end. I set my ear to the wall.

Clicks, in indecipherable sequence, sit within their instants and hail me as I pass them. I know these, but only in and of themselves. When I pull away and sit in my wooden chair (not restful; sticks to the skin), the clicks are too quiet to hear clearly. Their imagined placements—surely wrong, because I’ve found no pattern—mix with their true sounds in a stuttered march. Polyrhythmic logic fails to surface, but the convex displacement of its nearness presses aside notice of the inconsistencies.

I stand and stretch. My exhalation judders; my diaphragm knows something I don’t. The clicking stops. I sway in silence to no kept time at all.

#

I wake to the softest sound in the world. It’s five twenty-six in the morning. Breathing, next. A shift; weight against the wall. Too dark by half to see it bow; eyes veiled. My sight, scent, touch, and taste are thumb-ground into the dish of a mortar, left whole but seated firmly, by the outshutting demands of my ears. In—? Out—…? The breaths cease or have ceased. If I move, I’ll drown their echoes. Things smaller than possible carry messages across the space between—no, I think to myself. Yes, I think to myself. The space between us.

I rise, marking the distance from myself to silence with care, and step along the curve-time floor to lay my ear against the wall. A whisper, wordless voiceless, hails me as I pass its instant. I sag against the wall. It bows no more or less than it should.