Over time, Sally learned that her loudest of laughs were best saved for the times when her mother was out on the town or lounging by the pool, too far to hear her. But right around the time of her sixth birthday, she was swept up in an unexpected boldness, and soon discovered that she found a great deal of joy in laughing whenever she wanted.
Her mother, glaring up the stairs at the sound coming from her daughter’s room, had decided she’d had enough.
“My God,” she hissed at her husband across the kitchen counter, “My God!”
“Hm.” He didn’t look up.
“She’s like a trumpet!”
“Hm?”
“Just listen to her!”
He cocked his head for a moment, just as a laugh came down the stairs and into the room.
“Ah.” He said, nodding. Under his wife’s continued stare, he quickly added, “I’m sure she’ll get over it.”
But Sally didn’t get over it; she didn’t laugh less or laugh less loudly. No matter how many times her mother screamed or threatened or bargained with her, Sally continued, with her head lying back, to play the fanfare of her happiness.
Other people didn’t seem to mind. Whenever they went into town together, her mother’s hand was a clamp on Sally’s, and Sally felt all the silence her mother commanded of her surging through the hot pulse of that tight, old hand. But how could she help it? When a huge man in a suit sneezed like a kitten as he passed, when a dog begged her leash for a chance to kiss her…when a breeze, a car sputtering, a crowd…There was nothing Sally could do! Nothing else she wanted to do but let out the laugh that grew so much larger than the space she thought she had in her…and when she let loose, the faces around her lit up with wonder, not hate, and, smiling, sought her out!
Her mother shook with a quiet fury but was forced to hide her irritation in the company of all the encircling passersby that complimented her sincerely on the absolute amazement that was her daughter.
“I’ve never heard such a sweet sound!”
“What a darling voice…”
“-watta setta pipes!”
“It’s not so bad,” her husband said to her a few mornings later when one of the day’s first laughs charged into the kitchen at them. “Kinda nice, actually.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m just saying, maybe you sho-“
“Shut up!”
She was getting frantic; every day it seemed that more and more people went out of their way to encourage that damned girl, and it became clear to her that every day the laugh was getting louder.
In the face of this mounting enemy, she tried everything. Dehumidifiers all over the house worked day and night to dry the air enough to crack a throat. Milk replaced water at all meals to try and congeal it shut when it refused to crack. Many doors were fitted in the frame of her daughter’s room, each heavier and thicker than the last. But wood or steel, locked or unlocked, they all fell like curtains to the spectacle of Sally’s laugh.
She bought great big headphones, and when they didn’t work, she plugged her ears with anything that would seal them. Her husband, slow to notice her growing obsession with the eradication of their daughter’s laugh, finally grew uneasy when he heard his wife, ears clogged with candle wax, talking to herself, unaware of the volume of her own voice.
“Gotta stop it, gotta stop it, gotta stop it, c’mon now, think, c’monc’monc’monTHINK! -gottastopit, gotta stop it, gotta…”
“Dear,” he said with wide eyes, approaching her cautiously. But she did not see him.
“I’ll stop it, I’ll stop it, no more no more no more!”
He tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but just then she was chased from the room by a particularly joyous laugh that seized the whole house and shook it with tremendous vibrato.
For by now there was no denying that Sally’s laugh was growing to an amazing size, almost to the point of becoming dangerous. The house, indeed, had started rattling under the force of the sound canaling through it, and as day after day went by, the movement grew more and more violent. Sally’s father, doing his best to ignore his wife’s manic ear-plugging, busied himself with fastening everything loose in the house to the walls and floors. He had finished with the top floor of the house and was working on tying the dishes to their shelf when their next-door neighbors burst through the front door, screaming about an earthquake. But upon learning the real reason why their television had fallen onto its screen, they surprised Sally’s father by apologizing for the intrusion and happily leaving.
Indeed, it seemed that the community, slowly under siege by a glacier of growing laughter, was blissfully surrendering. Whenever Sally left the house now she would inevitably end up shattering a shop window or send cracks running down the sidewalk before her, yet nobody seemed to mind. In fact, the same faces that once smiled at her were now entirely enraptured; she was barraged with questions and praises everywhere she went, and when the crowds that grew around her grew silent, still their eyes remained on her, digging deep into the earth of her sound for some ore of meaning.
Sally began to notice the change. Once, a famous opera singer visited her and took a public vow of silence unless she would share with him the secrets of her voice. Another time, a priest cornered her and, after silently examining her, leaned in close and whispered, “I knew You would return...”
This bothered Sally, but she could not say why, and the bother did not last long. Time seemed to settle all of the questions of the people amassing around her, and soon they stopped approaching her at all and, instead, stood in distant reverence. They stared longingly until she laughed, and when she did they closed their eyes and let the sound run its course through their frames. No matter how hard they shook, they looked happy, seemed happy. And Sally still found her happiness in rearing back the channel of her body and allowing her laugher to take her and them all.
She hadn’t ever stopped enjoying her laugher, not when it knocked the books from her dresser or broke the mirror hanging on her wall. The boldness that had whisked into her seemed to bring with it some courage; when she reached for her journal and found that the sound had taken it from her, still she found it easy to laugh. When she sought her mirror and saw that she could no longer see herself, still she found it easy to laugh. There was a sort of music to it, her laughter, and when she was with it she felt no need for the things it had broken. Nothing felt missing when it played with her, and Sally was much happier with her reflection when it lay in the reverberations of the laughs that escaped her.
It felt so joyous, passing through her, that Sally didn’t mind one bit when one day it occurred to her that the laughter wasn’t her own. It was a revelation that did not stop her in her tracks or set cold blood dripping into her stomach, but the moment it came to her, she knew it was true. The laughter she was enjoying was not her laughter; it used her, took her as a vessel, and she felt now that it did not begin or end with her. It made a sort of quiet sense, and helped Sally understand why the laugh, the sound and power of which were growing every day, felt lighter and lighter in her mouth. What once seemed to threaten the muscles of her stomach with collapse now sat nicely at the top of throat, no heavier than her own breath. But her feet, at least, still trembled when the ground quaked with her laughter, and she was relieved to realize that she was no less moved by the sensation.
Her mother, however, had turned for the worse. Her ear canals were permanently glued shut from all the wax, and her outer ears had been badly maimed. She had taken to gnawing her teeth, in the hopes that the sound of gnashing would fill her head instead of that awful laugh, and she would ride out each episode bowing in some corner of the house, tearing with panicked hands at her ears. Even as she mauled them they let in the sound, and before she knew it her whole body was being carried by it, thrown around like a doll whenever it came.
She knew she was going insane; unlike her husband, she hadn’t thought to fasten down the things within her that weren’t tied to her walls and floors, and she felt those things fall and shatter every time her daughter flooded the home of her body with her laugh. What they were, she could not say, and yet she felt the growing loss take a terrible toll on her mind. Even when she was in the house, she felt the disturbance of that awful laugh travel incredible distances, and it haunted her that even if she ran as fast and as far as she could, it may take a lifetime or more to realize a place that was beyond its reach.
In the midst of her desperation, she was seized by a dark thought, one that could only survive in the war zone of her insanity: if she could not stop the laugh, could not quell it or keep it locked up, maybe she could stop the source of the laugh. Maybe instead of stopping that girl, she could find a way to stop her from being happy…
Cold days followed in the house that shook with laughter. Crouched over, and moving with great care, she stalked through the rooms, always thinking, always ready to stumble upon that mysterious answer that she so dreadfully wanted. But her searches for inspiration seemed fruitless; there was nothing that girl did, nothing it seemed she could take away! She tore at herself, still, when the laughs came, but now her claws ripped at her mind as well as her ears; she needed an answer, and if were in her, she’d find it and drag it out if she had to.
It was only after a laugh pinned her against a window that she saw the crowd outside of her house, and remembered all those stupid smiles that always seemed to follow that damned girl. She was still for a moment, unsure of the significance she felt brewing within her, until suddenly it burst hit her:
“They’d know!” she exclaimed, slamming her hands against the glass.
“What?” her husband said.
“THEY’D KNOW!” she shouted, blowing past him and unfastening a photo album from the heavily-bound bookshelf in the living room.
Upon seeing and hearing her like this, on top of everything else, her husband felt something break between them, and could not imagine that broken thing to be mendable. All of his possessions he had already tied down tightly to the house, and so he decided not to bring anything with him, but at the last minute he untied and held at his side his suitcase, to provide a visual for his near-deaf wife.
“I’m leaving!” he half-shouted at her, leaning back and forth to follow her wandering eye. She gave him only a moment’s recognition before continuing to frantically flip through pages and pages of pictures.
“I’m leaving,” he said a moment later, much quieter, in the doorway of Sally’s room. “This whole thing your mother I- I’m just a simple man, you see “
Startled, Sally opened her mouth to say something (she hadn’t quite decided what), but a tremendous laugh took its place, and sent him topping down the gyrating staircase and spat him onto the rolling street.
His departure unnerved her, but not so much as the fact that she’d laughed at his goodbye. The reality that it wasn’t hers hadn’t quite settled in when the laugh started popping up in moments that she knew weren’t funny to her, and at those times the laugh, lighter than ever in her mouth, shook her and everything around her the hardest.
Soon she began to question everything; if it were not hers, and if it were not in harmony with her happiness, then what was it? What could it possibly be doing for her, to her? In the wake of her questions, she felt the places within her that were once rocked by the laugh cry out in desperate hunger; she had thought the laugh as something nourishing, thought her surrender to it as a healthy one, yet only now could she feel just how starved her body was for the things it could have made, how much it craved to be a player and not an instrument. Thoughts of failure crept into her mind, but she refused to surrender the boldness that had started it all: it would be the cornerstone of the Sally she was going to build around and despite her laughter.
But where to start? For so long, her happiness (or so she had thought to name it) had been self-sufficient, unworried; not once did it ever waver, never did it threaten to leave her. And as easy as it had come, as effortless as it had stayed, so it left: so smoothly that Sally couldn’t even trace the scars. Now she had nothing but a laugh that tickled the roof of her mouth and tossed her body around, careless and alien. She knew she needed more.
She tore through her house, searching desperately for the things she used to hold and the things that used to hold her back before the laugh. But the laugh, sensing danger, lashed out, and Sally fought the collapsing walls and splintering ceilings of her home to clamber into her room, the living room, the kitchen, the basement…but there was nothing! Nothing at all to remind Sally of what had made her happy.
She ran, leaping onto the street just as her house, along with the two surrounding it, collapsed into the geyser of dust that took their place. Everything around her was ending; streets like tidal waves toppled buildings and sent cars flying in every direction, and telephone wires streamed across the sky as glass and concrete swarmed in droves. An incredible groan seeped out of all the chaos, but despite the absolute strength of the sound of scraping metal and tumbling brick, nothing broke through quite so clearly or so loudly as the continued, incredible laugh.
As Sally ran she began to see up-close the people that were bouncing along the rolling waves of pavement: eyes closed, breathing easy, silent and submissive to the apocalypse around them. It occurred to her, like it had her mother, that these were the same people who seemed to know something about Sally that she herself didn’t know. Maybe, she thought, those easy smiles betrayed some greater understanding; maybe, she thought, it could be the understanding that makes their smiles so easy…
Difficult as it was, she scaled a pile of rubble so huge that it seemed steady even under the constant, pulsating laugh, and turned to face the crowd that, as always, began to form around her. She had thought the words would come to her in such a moment of significance, but just as she realized they weren’t coming, a sudden stillness swept through the world, and left a silence that seemed as violent as the laugh it had replaced.
Sally bit her lip in thought, thinking of what to ask.
“We know who you are,” a voice called from the crowd, after a beat, and similar reassurances rippled out. But Sally, still fighting with stolen boldness to build from within, shirked at their assumption, and saw at that moment a sadness in those who gathered around her simply to enjoy an unearned laugh. She bit her lip even tighter, sealing her questions for a more trustworthy audience, and moved to climb down the rubble and out of view of the crowd that for the first time made her uncomfortable…
But just as she was about to take her first steps down, Sally caught sight of her mother, writhing through the crowd in a manic pace. Her ears were almost completely gone, and her head, compensating for the lack of hearing, darted in every direction, keeping everything in sight. Her clothes were congealed and moldy, her eyes wild, and her hands, with cracked, bloody fingernails, held photographs right in front of the eyes of every person she was passing.
“She looks like this,” she was shouting, moving excitedly from person to person, “Her! Do you know her? Look, she looks like this, and and I need to know what makes her happy, what’s getting that laugh going…no? grrrrr….Do you know this girl?...Do you know this girl?...”
The breath that left Sally when she saw her mother this way left a hole that started to fill with many bubbling, boiling, scalding things; thoughts of her mother’s ears and her voice and her calls for her own daughter’s happiness knotted together and tangled her mind, scraping the inside of her skull. There was no room in her for anything of the sort, no place for her to put these horrible new things; she couldn’t think, couldn’t stand, and only opened her mouth to breathe when she realized that her front teeth had split her bottom lip…
And when she did she felt the slightest sensation dance right on the end of her tongue as a crescendo of astronomic sound crashed all around her. The laugh was incredible now, entirely inhuman, powerful to the point of primal; it screamed through every single thing around it, flooded every surface and structure with its presence and swelled them until they shattered from within. It was light to Sally, though, who felt a terrible joy in allowing her body to surrender once more, to fill up all of the space within her with the laugh that could block out all of the terrible new things that were growing there…
But she would not, no matter how her mother had sweetened the temptation with years of stifling and suppressing, laugh at the creature that her mother had become. She fought, with every single place in her body, until finally, with an almost imperceptible leap, the laugh left her tongue and poured out onto the world, passing through each and every dancer of the violent dance before crashing them all into one another, down into oblivion, annihilation, and total and complete silence.
It would be a dreadful ending for most of us: the end of everything that we can see outside of our own windows. But not for Sally. Her world now is the one that grows within her, the soft twitterings of a pit band, ready with itching fingers to start the show with one real, loud, true note.
Reply With Quote
