JosephineAnderson.ca

As a girl, people laughed at her, their smiles convulsing under noses and nostrils backlit by sky.

As a young woman, she grew her hair long to her waist and thought it was poetic, like the wisps of a willow tree. Others thought her hair resembled, in colour and texture, a nest of mice in a pile of dirt.

She dreamed big for herself. She anticipated applause (of some sort, at some point) from a dark, unlit crowd. And then the mass of figures would be silent and still, hoping they might sense in the nerves of their listening toes some tiny vibration emitted from her slow, meaningful first step onto stage, and they would try to hold on to the memory of this tiny feeling in the toe long after it had passed, and they’d try to feel it over and over again so they wouldn’t forget it, her first step. It would be one of those steps that take up the whole screen, its every sound and absence of sound filling every speaker all around. Heel gently lowering to toes, applause.

She imagined herself growing from human to erected town statue, admired from all sides, towering, to remind the laughing noses and nostrils of how wrong they once were. She imagined her hair growing gradual, seductive streaks of gray (sparkling gray, not dull), and she foresaw herself becoming known, recognized while shopping for bell peppers or bending to take a newspaper from the stand, as Matron of The Arts.

Everything she did, she did deliberately. As if all her actions might someday, when she’s famous, be worth something. As if someone might be secretly recording and chronicling her every move, as if one day someone would try to sell these old forgotten records for extreme amounts of money to some collector of rarities, at which time, of course, she wouldn’t protest, because she’d have enough money from her artistic achievements to last her three lifetimes.

Now she is loud and obnoxious, in a way that doesn’t pass with age. She speaks to be heard, whether there’s someone there or not. She whistles loudly, sings loudly, breathes loudly, unbearably loudly.

She speaks every little thought, including extraneous conjunctions, and when she can’t remember what she was about to say she holds onto a word indefinitely, stretching the end of the sentence until it’s nothing but a menacing refrigerator hum, until she remembers what she was going to say next.

She is a pitilessly enduring tone.

In her head she is quite silent. Sometimes she tries to hear her own voice in her mind, but she can’t recall it, as if she’d never actually used it before. Sometimes she wonders what would happen if people finally heard what she had to say.

But she is too shy and never says anything at all.