Last Words

When she spoke people hung on her every word. Literally. Twelve were dead by the time she had introduced herself, another twenty four dropped during an anecdote about a bath she took that morning. It was never the content, on the contrary, each of her stories carried the arc of a soaring bird, and, had they been written down, contained enough rose-tinted, sugar-coated innocence and optimism to taint even the hardest of cynical hearts. Sadly they never were. Rather, she spoke them aloud and thus the timbre and timing of those sonorous tones conspired against her, drawing her downfall. It was in the specific pitch of that velvet voice her fate lay, neither languid nor lackadaisical, deadpan nor downbeat, it was more like a tuning fork of melancholy, that once tapped made the listener hum, softly at first, but then more and more, growing with such intensity than it soon became unbearable for the poor in earshot. Driven, at any cost, to cease those resonations set in motion by that siren, those oscillations which opened a path, a view, that gave at once a glimpse of the eternal and a knowledge of the emptiness, one by one they would escape, they would end it all to stop the small, they would queue, cap in hand, for the silence of silence. Finally there were none left. No one left to listen. Just her, alone, in a small empty room with small empty chairs. In the attic she found a dusted tape recorder, she brought it down and sat in the front room, the last of the sunlight slipping through the window. She clicked it on and sang. Dans la nuit froide
de l'oubli, tu vois, je n'ai pas oublié la chanson que tu me chantais. The tape whirred as it sped back, she adjusted the volume, lay down and set it in motion. A small warm feeling grew gently in her stomach, a tingle spreading through her abdomen, her rib cage, her torso and outwards, and as the white light swallowed her whole, she clicked her heavy tongue in little more than acceptance, the dead now muted.