Voice on the Wing

1: When the Voices Speak

Psychic

The 'role' of a psychic is a difficult one.

No. Difficult... Difficult is not easy. Difficult is finding your other sock when you need to get to work. Not being able to open the jar of mayonnaise.

Difficult. Yes. And Everest is a big hill.

A psychic. To know what you can't tell. To feel what can break your heart but can shatter the life of another. To see what cannot be unseen and what shouldn't be seen.

A psychic is ridiculed. Why wouldn't they be? Charlatans and carnival side show oddities. Dipping their toes into the supernatural world as if it were a pool where they are testing the temperature before diving in. Except they never dive in. The waters are always cold. If your toe were to stay submerged, the chill would eat into your body, devouring it inch by inch until you become frozen by the darkness. But the supernatural doesn't exist. It can't. We are, then we are not. Or we come back as a butterfly or perhaps a bird, to shit on those who have wronged us over the years.

Psychics. Pah!

But...

I see things. I know things. I wish I could close my eyes or keep my hands to myself, but I don't see with my eyes. I don't feel with my hands. There is nothing to close and no pockets in which to shove this... thing.

I wish I didn't. If I could have gone through life as a normal person, I would have been happy. I would have been a teacher, I think. I would have liked to nurture children. To help them on their way to fulfilling their dreams. Instead, my own dreams are filled with nightmares. If not a teacher, then an astronaut. That was my plan as a child. Walk in space. See the stars from somewhere only a few have stepped. Even working in a fast food restaurant, serving fries and a shake to an endless stream of busy parents and travelling salesmen would have been something. I would be a 'people person.' A smile and a charming chat as they ordered, paid for and took their food, not even bothering to notice me or my name. I wouldn't have minded.

When you're five years old and you wake every night screaming, your parents age prematurely. They want to help, trying their best to find the right treatment for your night terrors, but nothing works. They sleep in shifts, waiting for the crying to begin. The doctors tell them, initially, it's an overactive imagination. Don't worry. As he gets older, he'll grow into it and turn it into something wonderfully creative. After a while, the doctors become psychiatrists. Therapists. So many tablets are taken you feel you would rattle if you jumped up and down. It puts you off going on your friend's trampoline. That's while you have friends. They drift away, falling off like the leaves of a tree at the turn of autumn. Eventually, when the stress becomes too much for your loving parents, their love for each other cracks under the strain and they separate. Then divorce.

In the meantime, you learn to not cry every night. You wake up with silent tears and a wet pillow which you use to stifle your sobs. It's too late for your parents, and too late for that spark of a smile which did everything it could to remain ignited in your heart. The darkness extinguishes it. The dreams snuff it out. Then you are alone. I. I was alone.

Except, I had voices.

At first, I didn't realise that's what they were. When I was that child and sleep was something others spoke of and I wished for, I felt a warmth in my ear. A caress of the neck when no-one was there. They were like butterfly wings with no substance other than the memory of their beat. Then, when I laid in your bed, I'd catch a rhythm to them, a tangible flow which distinguished them from the errant meanderings of the sound of the night. Not voices, as such, but not meaningless noises inside my head as if my brains were trying to eat their way out.

As I grew, sleep became less of a need and more of a myth. I would steal moments of blissful unconsciousness throughout the day. Insomnia and narcolepsy, they said. They didn't know. So many years of tests on my hearing and psychological imbalance resulted in nothing. A complete absence of reason. I was an anomaly. Sympathetic at first and resigned later, they, the unnamed and unknown who said they had done all they could though it had come to naught, eventually gave up. Discharging me. That's what it was called. What they called it. When their options had fled under cover of treatment, I were discharged. If I peered deeper under the cover however, I would see that no, they had given up. All that had been discharged was hope.

So, I had the voices.

I'd feel before hearing the tone and the... the taste. They had a flavour. It was sweet, with a hint of... something. It was difficult to assign a name, a specific description. But I'd know they were about to speak to me, whoever they were. The air would thicken. The night would darken or the day would become somehow brighter. Then they would be there.

When you were twelve years old, they had become a constant. It was as if they had always been there, whispering to you but never quite becoming background noise. So you spoke back. You, calmly rather than the shouting which had always preceded, said hello. As simple aas that. A greeting.

The voices stilled. Time hung in the air, dancing with the dust mites in the spray of the sun through the blinds. You spoke again - the same word - except it was now a question.

"Hello?"

When they began again, they were hesitant. I still couldn't clearly make out what they were saying, but I knew they were answering. At first, our dialogue was a nonsense, of course. I could have been speaking gibberish to someone who only understood gobbledegook. I tried to guide the conversation to a direction where I could maybe find a common ground, such as a movie or food. It didn't matter, our words hit each other on the way across the divide between us and tumbled, misunderstood, to the floor. I felt guided, though. A push of sound or a pull of silence. We would go running in the woods near my house and I'd listen intently to them as I ran. They never slowed or advanced too far ahead. They were just there, beside me. I would turn this way and that until my sense of direction had become forever lost in the spinning of my bearings. I would only find my way back by the angle of the sun and the sound of traffic on the road.

One day, about three weeks before my thirteenth birthday, we were in the woods again. The clouds were darkening. I'd felt, and ignored, the first spits of rain. It would blow over, my mother had told me. Don't worry. So I didn't. I ran with the voices. I laughed at their sound. I threw myself through bushes where I couldn't see what was on the other side, fully trusting in their guidance.

That's when I found the dogs. Eight of them. Their innards had been swapped for pine cone. I didn't know where the intestines and organs were and I had never seen so many pine cones in my life. I wondered if they would spread out if the rains did come and would that make the canine carcasses seem as if they were expanding after death.

The eyes of the dogs were gone. Cheap, pound shop fairy wings, the sort which would fall to bits by the time you got them home, had been stapled to their backs.