All the Rest is Silence
Words write themselves upon her skin when she speaks. The letters emerge like a developing photograph, and become a permanent record of each frustrated mutter, each whispered confidence. As a child, she scrubbed herself raw, trying to erase a secret she revealed to her best friend, a secret she promised never to tell, but the secret, if anything, looked even more visible against her tender red skin. She began to wear long sleeves in the summertime, and knee socks to thwart the boys who snuck under the table to pull up her pant legs in hopes of glimpsing the words scrawled on her ankle. Her parents stripped her naked in the bathroom and peered between her thighs and in the hollows of her armpits, searching for lies. As a teenager, she stood naked in front of her boyfriend while he tried to find other boys' names tangled in the answers to biology questions and recitations of Shakespearean sonnets.
Words write themselves upon her skin when she speaks, so she speaks carefully. "I love you," she says, over and over. Every time, the words flower elsewhere on her body, covering her in a passionate tattoo. The curling, cursive script climbs like pea tendrils up the back of her neck, down along her arms, and on the hidden expanse of her belly. "I love you," she says, hoping that the delicate words will begin to overwrite the other messages, those written in harsh scrawls, and the ones stamped in sterile sans serif all-caps. The derisive middle-school mocking. The silky lies, the angry curses. It will take a lot of "I love you's" to cover up those other words, which are written in darker ink, and thicker lines. She says "I love you" until the letters grow like a garden on her skin, so that the world will know she loved more than she hated. "I love you," she says, and tries to mean it. She says it until she blossoms like a rose.
Enjoying this story? Don't miss the next one!
SUBSCRIBE TO DSF
"Beautiful," he says. His eyes are sage and catlike. "She's written in truth, you see." I want to tell him that there are many truths, just like there are many words, and she has only chosen to speak some of them. The other words--the unspoken ones--write themselves inside her, weaving through her ventricles and veins and wrapping themselves around her heart. The words left unspoken expand and contract with her lungs. They hitch rides on the oxygen molecules. They plunge into her stomach and snake through her intestines. They can make her sick, those words, if she lets them. Or, they can weave together, hooking arms, scaffolding her from the inside. They become fascia, spinal and cerebral fluid. They build themselves into a layer of fat that insulates her from the cold that protects her from blows.
But I don't say this. I don't say anything. He notes my silence, and nods his approval. My words seethe beneath my skin, where they reach down my fingers and lurk beneath my fingernails.
When he grabs my hand, I drag one nail across his palm. One day soon, our words--all of them--will scratch themselves to the surface. They will not be delicate. They will scream like fire.
The End
This story was first published on Wednesday, November 21st, 2018
We hope you enjoyed
All the Rest is Silence by
Jennifer Hudak.
Please support Daily Science Fiction by becoming a member.
Daily Science Fiction does not have a paywall, but we do have expenses—more than 95% of which are direct payments to authors for their stories. With your $15 membership, less than 6 cents per story, we can continue to provide genre fiction every weekday by email and on the website to thousands of readers for many years to come.
Support Daily Science Fiction
Please click to rate this story from 1 (ho-hum) to 7 (excellent!):
Please don't read too much into these ratings. For many reasons, a superior story may not get a superior score.
5.1 Rocket Dragons Average
Please join our mailing list and
receive free daily sci-fi (your email address will be kept
100% private):
