Deafening silents

Chapter 1

      Screaming. Blood curdling screams burst through the silence. The voices sounded young, as did all the voices Celeste heard.  She slowly turned to her mother, eyes wide, to see if she had heard it too. Her mother had no reaction. Before Celeste could turn away, her mother caught her worried expression.
"Celeste," she said in a low voice. "What's wrong? Are you okay?" she put her hand on Celeste's knee. Her mother hadn't heard the screams. That wasn't possible, Celeste thought. There's no way she could have missed that.

These one's seemed so real. The voices. But she knew they weren't. They couldn't be. No one else heard them except her. When she was younger, she heard the voices to. She thought that maybe she was special. Like she had the superpower of  super hearing or the ability to talk to ghosts. "Celeste... " she'd hear from outside her fifth grade classroom. "Celeste... " the voices would say softly. Celeste would ignore them, but they started to get louder. "CELESTE!"  they'd yell out, beckoning her into the hallway. She knew they would stop until she got up, walked out into the hallway to find nobody there. But she was stubborn. She waited until the very last moment, the moment where she started to get a headache because of the volume of the voices, to go into hallway. And once she did, the voices seemed to be at peace.

But that was then. Five years ago the voices gave warning before striking. Now they would wait until she was relaxed, before exploding in her head like fireworks on the fourth of  July. And now they didn't just repeat her name over and over again, they talked to her. They really talk to her. Do this, say that. Sometimes she couldn't tell the difference between her own conscious and the voices.

"Celeste? Are you okay?" her mother asked. Celeste knew she couldn't tell her mother what had happened. She also knew that if she limited herself to the amounts she said her mother would fill in the blanks and not question her own logic. "Thought I heard something." Celeste said. "Its must have been the TV." her mom concluded. "Ya, probably." Celeste said. She gave her mother a smile, but it wasn't sincer. Her mom smiled back, then the silence that that been there before the screams swept over them once again.

Most of Celeste's time spent with her mother was like this. Silent. Her mother's eyes drifted around the room. Celeste liked her mother's room. It was the biggest of the bedrooms. Since there house was only one floor, her family fighted over space. The room was painted a dark gray with white detailing where the wall and the roof met. She had once had a beautiful white carpet, but after thirteen years of wear into it, it was mostly an eggshell colour with a couple stains. But Celeste didn't have any carpet in her room, which made her floor cold. Especially in the winter. A stained carpet was better than non at all. In the middle of the room was her king sized bed and in front it was a large flat screen TV. But her mother never used it. She like to sit in the dark - alone.

When Celeste got home from school she cleaned. The living room, the dishes and the laundry. Then she went to her hideaway in the attic. The one place her family couldn't find her. When her mom got home with her little sister Lilly, they fought. Celeste's mother would argue with Lilly about the most random things. They would yell at each other from across the house until one of them stomped to there room. Then they wouldn't come out until the next morning. Celeste rushed around the house in the morning to get ready before the bus came. Meanwhile Lilly and her mother would be bickering back and forth. Then Celeste would run out the the door and it would start all over again.

Celeste looked at her mother and smiled. Her mother still had that "descending beauty" look as Celeste called it. Her once beautiful long blonde hair, bright blue eyes and tan skin had turned in to a shaggy brown and grey mop, dull grey eyes and pale skin. But somehow you could still see beauty through all that. She really started to go down when her dad left, but that's a different story.

"How was your day?" she asked, as she usually did to make conversation. It took her mom a while to answer. "Good," she said distantly. There was no point anymore Celeste reminded her self. Her mother was gone, and she had left a lifeless body in her place.

That night after she had put her sister to bed and said good night to her mother, Celeste laid in bed staring at the sealing full of glow-in-the-dark stars she had stuck on her roof when she was around 7. She didn't like them anymore but they had been there for as long as she could remember and there was no point in taking then down now. "CELESTE!" voices screamed. Celeste tried to ignore them but for previous experience she knew that would work. "Yes," she said calmly. For the next minute or so all she heard were whispers and hisses. Then, as if it had finally made up its mind, there was silents."Let's have some fun..."