The Whispering, Part 2
Day 1: First Encounter
Issue #419 Keith’s SciFi Musings Sunday, November 19, 2023
The whispers didn’t want to hurt him, or at least he didn’t think that’s what they wanted. Because why would they wait all these months?
Jonas also didn’t think they were ghosts, because he had dealt with ghosts before and ghosts didn’t have any problem expressing themselves. Plus ghosts were just people’s unsettled spirit matter. To Jonas, ghosts were proof that there wasn’t a heaven or a hell, just another set of choices.
But the whispers were something else entirely…
There is a first time for everything; a first kiss, a first child. A first love. Usually, when we recall a lifetime event that is a first, it is something good. Something warm, something comfortable; something that makes us smile whenever the memory taps us on the shoulder. Memories that oftentimes come to our rescue whenever we are trying to navigate our way through a difficult time. They appear as a bit of encouragement and a reminder that there were better times once upon a time, and that better times could be ahead. Just hold onto those memories.
Because the bad memories, the ones that make us toss and turn, perhaps even scream, are the ones that get discarded and buried. We bury them deep inside those darkened, sealed compartments embedded within the hardened flesh of our altered consciousness so that they cannot escape; or worse, so they cannot interfere with our preferred perceptions.
Usually, that works. But it didn’t work that way for Jonas; at least not when it came to his memory of the first time he heard the whispering. Because for the longest, he would tell himself that the first time happened on a Thursday morning in early spring when he was only 6 years old. School recess had just ended and all the kids were being asked to line up to be shepherded back inside the building. Jonas was, as usual, at the end of the line to be shepherded because he figured (correctly) that was where Miss Baines, who was at the front of the line and would usually disappear through the door early, was least likely to catch him in the act of whatever his mischief had in mind that particular day and moment.
That Thursday, as soon as Miss Baines disappeared through the door, with the rest of his classmates dutifully following behind, Jonas stepped out of line and ran back onto the playground to grab a large blue ball that he had spotted. He didn’t remember seeing it the entire time he and the other kids had been outside playing, which was what made him curious. Where had this ball come from? But the closer he got, the louder he began to hear…
What was that?
The next thing he knew, Jonas was lying on a small cot in the school infirmary, surrounded by anxious adults - including his mother who, strangely enough, did not try to convince him that he hadn’t heard what he was trying so desperately to describe within the confines of a 6-year-old vocabulary wholly ill-equipped to capture the horror of it all.
“These…whispers. Is this the first time you heard them, Jonas?”
Jonas nodded furiously.
“Yes! Yes!”
But he was wrong. The first time the whispers had visited him was in his mother’s womb. She had heard them too.
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