A Silent Lullaby

Epilogue

[TITLE PAGE]

KRYE PARK

A CITY KNOWN FOR A FAMOUS INVENTION

BY

JESSICA GURNEY

Approx word count [2,631]

What is Trauma? According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, trauma is defined as the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event. But what if it is more than that? What if an event so distressing, so detrimental had occurred it completely wreck someone's personality?

In all sense it is a mental phenomenon. And it can be said the trauma is the aftermath of a fateful miserable experience, for example, getting chased by a canine, might create the fear of owning a pet. Traumatic stress treatment is not required for everyone. With time, most people recover on their own. However, mental health professionals such as psychologists can assist you in developing healthy coping strategies following a traumatic event. In all actuality, rather it depends on how traumatic the experience was that determines the recovery process.

Krye Park; the music box; a highly advanced city; skyscrapers in the center; older run-down outskirts with interesting light life; no lights at all in those outskirts to save on budget; and evidently domestic terrorism.

Those simple sentences can actually describe the little well-known city of Krye Park, located in a small county in Arizona. What's ironic is the fact this advanced city was hardly known, even though it was a bustling hub for manufacturing and both commerce and e-commerce. On the other hand, once invisible on the map, now is known nationwide, going viral on popular social media such as TikTok and Instagram. Now receiving national recognition and one or two foreign media outlets reporting, more and more people have traveled to this mysterious city, but have been repelled since its mass closure. Though, being mysterious in its past, that is no longer the case; we vaguely understand what happened that day over a month ago. It was the music box.

Some may ask how a music box could cause this chaos, but I will tell you. According to some key witnesses, this so-called music box prayed on its users. Like a predatory world prey on its prey in the wild.

One man, who claimed to escape the city in just enough time said this, "I saw... I had to hide, but this machine would like... eat them."

Not that I am questioning his credibility, but at times when experiencing traumatic experiences such as violence, and other emotionally traumatic events can lead to dissociative amnesia, which can be seen as a coping mechanism by allowing people to forget details of the event temporarily. "Trauma can shut down episodic memory and fragment the sequence of events. The hippocampus is responsible for creating and recalling episodic memory. Trauma can prevent information (like words, images, sounds, etc.) from different parts of the brain from combining to make a semantic memory." (Integrative Psychotherapy Mental Health Blog). Also according to the National Library of Medicine "...Our review suggests that individuals with PTSD, a history of trauma, or depression are at risk for producing false memories when they are exposed to information that is related to their knowledge base."

I'm not saying that this man, whose own name he forgot, had a history of trauma or PTSD or depression, but I am saying that this experience could be so great that it had affected him so much that he even happened to forget his own name. And that is not the cream of the crop regarding him— "... it would like... eat them..."

This is a very interesting event that occurred. And if one is not too familiar with the original construction of an old-timey music box and how it would play, a music box works by rotating a meat cylinder with protruding pins that pluck the individual prongs of a steel comp. The sounds that resonate from the vibrating prongs are the notes we hear—louder noses form prongs and higher notes form shorter ones (Popular Mechanics). So I think most of you reading may have come to the same questionable conclusion I have come to right now: did this larger-than-life music box actually pluck its victims to create the music that I have been told it produced? But, if it 'plucked' humans, how would it create the music? That is physically improbable and impossible to create. One cannot simply make a machine that uses humans to make original music. Humans don't have the physical attributes to do such a thing unless maybe we have walked into a science fiction novel by Stephen King and we are just the characters who are victims of his phenomenal storytelling and very intriguing writing style when creating chapters.