We’re pleased to announce the winner of the July WWWC: Andrew Harris! Responding to the prompt ‘those shiny happy people’, Andrew’s ‘Noise’ creeps up on you quietly.

Read his winning entry below.

Noise

He wishes he could be like those happy shiny people in TV commercials. Isn’t that how we’re all supposed to be? Wide white-toothed smiles and perfect everything. Singing along to the radio like everyone’s watching and you don’t care. He wishes he could be like that, but knows he never will. 

He pads through the house from the bedroom, barely lifting his feet. The soft movement as he shuffles along the carpet echoes in his head. 

Swish, swish – swish, swish. It’s like the beating of his heart, only with more static electricity. His heartbeat thunders loudly in his ears, pulse straining at his neck and wrists as though it’s about to explode through the artery wall with the crash of a runaway train. 

Stay calm. Be in the moment. 

This is the advice his therapist gave him. Nonsense. A hippy mantra. He still repeats the words in his head. 

Focus on every sound. Feel every footstep. It lessens the anxiety, apparently. Something about silencing the chattering monkeys in his head, or some such bullshit. There are always plenty of voices in his brain. None of them belong to primates. Still, it’s worth a go. He’s hasn’t any better strategies of his own. None at all. 

The noise changes as his feet slide from carpet to kitchen tile. The swishing becomes a dull slap. He appreciates the change in tonality like a conductor appreciates a subtle change in an arrangement. 

He turns the kitchen tap. The burble of water changes from a drip to a gush as he increases the pressure, filling the jug in seconds. He hears every drop collide with its steel innards. 

He sets the water to boil. Click. 

More padding across tiles, journeying from sink to refrigerator. He’s taken these few small steps a thousand times before. Never once thought about it. Now, he’s Neil Armstrong stepping down from the lunar module, his kitchen the Sea of Tranquillity. 

Grabs the milk. Back to bench. Tinkle of teaspoon in coffee mug. Granulated coffee, then sugar, tumbling from spoon to cup. No less monumental than walking on the moon. 

An incessant buzzing, drifting in through the open window. The hum of a million petrol-driven hornets. The bloke next door’s fired up his lawnmower. Early. Again. A relentless two-stroke droning, the splutter of a dying man refusing to expire. 

Reframe. Like the therapist said. It’s just another part of the orchestra, the woodwind section coming in. The music fills the void created when the monkeys stop chattering. 

It’s the silence he fears most. The monkeys gone away. The silence makes him miss work. Stay in bed all day. Or the couch. At least then there’s the TV for company. Blaring images fill the silence even when he’s not watching them. People with wide smiles and perfect teeth. Perfect lives. 

The orchestra stops playing abruptly. All at once. No dramatic crescendo. Not even a lingering last chord. The oxygen sucked from his lungs. The bloke next door’s turned off his lawnmower. That’s all. Not driven it over his chest, although that’s what it feels like. 

No more buzzing from myriad petrol-driven hornets. Coffee made. No more bubbling hot water. Or tinkling teaspoons. Or milk gushing from the carton. Silence. 

His legs stop working. Muscles liquefied. No more small steps, no giant leap. Arms paralysed. He can’t even lift the coffee cup to his lips to take one of those vulgar slurps that had annoyed his wife so much. 

Fingers stiff as steel. Tries drumming them. He’d known it irritated his family, driven his kids crazy. So why had he kept doing it? 

Not the slightest tremor in his hands. Stares at the left one. He’s still wearing his wedding ring. 

Standing immobile in his kitchen, stranded on the Sea of Tranquillity, he’s so far from home. 

All those science fiction movies are wrong. There are no sizzling laser blasts in space. No deafening explosions. No roaring rocket ships. Only a vacuum. Only silence. Planets could collide, entire worlds split apart like ripe fruit. Nothing would be heard. 

Lives can end without fanfare. Swallowed up by the terrible silence. 

He’s all alone. 

He can’t even hear the sound of his own breathing. 

If it stopped, how would he know?