The Invention of Sound

by Chuck Palahniuk

It was a shitty double standard. Visually, pictures were better every year. With computer graphics. With digitally animated everything. But sound-wise, it was still two coconut shells for every shot showing a horse.

Only in prisons and aboard submarines were people more excited about food than they were in office jobs.

What had it been like to be eleven years old? Twelve? If she couldn’t sleep, her father would pile together a nest of old blankets in the middle of the sound pit. She’d curl into the nest, and he’d extinguish the lights. In that soundless, lightless place he could delete the whole world. Then slowly he’d construct a new world around her. Seated at the mixing console he’d create the sound of wind. He’d add the crackle of logs in a fireplace. The sonorous ticktock of an antique clock. The rattle of a loose pane in a leaded-glass window. Her father would build a castle around her and place her in the highest tower. Doing all of this with only sound, he’d place her in a canopy bed hung with embroidered velvet, and she’d fall asleep. That was her memory of being twelve.

Mitzi brought the knife up a little, asking, “Who are you to say I won’t stab you?” “Because,” Adamah said, “you’re a coward.” He stepped closer and reached for the wounded wrist. “You’re the worst kind of victim: a victim who thinks she’s a villain.”