The Woman Who Sees Sound and the Forms That Won…
The Woman Who Sees Sound and the Forms That Won't Take Hoofprints
Lead-in:
Found this stapled to a disability benefits rejection letter at a bus stop. Someone had drawn music notes in the margins with what looks like blood but was probably ketchup. Gets reposted in shelter newsletters, always with different parts highlighted, like everyone's reading a different story.
---
Desta can't talk anymore but she hums.
In that shit Barney costume at the intersection where five roads meet wrong. Humming. Not songs. Just sounds. Like a broken refrigerator if refrigerators had throat cancer.
People stop. I don't know why.
Yuki says she knows why. She sees it. The sound, I mean. Actually sees it.
She's got this thing—synesthesia but wrong or backwards or something. When Desta hums, Yuki sees purple. When cars honk, yellow. When someone screams—
"Red," she says. "Always red. Even when it's happy screaming."
I don't understand this. She draws it sometimes. Looks like nothing to me. Looks like my kid could draw it. I don't have a kid.
---
Desta tried to record the humming. Make money. Pay for surgery. Here's how that went:
Spotify: Need address
Bandcamp: Need bank account
SoundCloud: Need email which needs phone which needs—fuck it
Coffee shop open mic: Need ID
She has three IDs. None match. Dead name, legal name, real name. The shelter isn't an address. The prepaid phone isn't a phone. She isn't a person, technically. Technically.
---
The Goon Ox.
I should explain but I can't. Four legs, different lengths. Walks like it's falling. Someone made it up or it made itself up or—
It tried to get disaster relief after the fires. Someone saved the form:
Address: "The ground"
REJECTED
That's it. That's the whole story. A hoofprint where the signature should be. They probably thought it was a joke. Everything's a joke if you're not living it.
---
Yuki sits at the intersection seeing things.
"That bench screams," she says.
"Benches don't—"
"At fifteen thousand hertz. You can't hear it. But it screams about who can't sleep on it."
She's mapped forty-seven screaming benches. Also cameras that hum. Fences that whisper. The check-cashing place that makes a sound like—
"Like what?"
"Like thirty percent interest. Green. Tastes like pennies."
"Tastes?"
She walks away. Does that when I ask too many questions.
---
Karim showed up. Still has ash in his hair. The checkpoint burned for six minutes and thirteen seconds. He counted.
"Why thirteen seconds?"
"Wasn't my counting. Just how long it took."
Yuki told him he's humming. Not with his mouth. With his bones or some shit. Twenty-eight hertz she said but then said twenty-nine, then thirty. Numbers change every time.
"You're making those up," I said.
"Everything's made up. But some made-up things are real."
What the fuck does that mean?
---
The intersection: five roads, one triangle of nothing.
North: condemned apartments, seventeen families
South: check-cashing, thirty percent to touch your own money
East: dead clinic
West: store that sells expired everything
Center: Desta humming
This is—what? Not a neighborhood. A leftover. A place the city forgot to gentrify or destroy.
Yet.
---
Yuki wants to build a museum. For invisible people. I laughed.
"Where?"
"Here."
"They'll tear it down."
"In frequencies they can't see then. Twenty-eight thousand—no, thirty thousand—the number doesn't matter. Somewhere they can't see."
"That's not how museums work."
"Museums don't work. That's the point."
Room one would be Desta's humming as color. Room two, the Goon Ox's wobble as architecture. Room three, Karim's six minutes on repeat. Room four, empty.
"For who?"
"Everyone we can't see either."
---
Producer heard Desta humming. Offered fifty dollars for "authentic street sound." Studio's forty miles away. Bus doesn't go there. Uber's sixty. Recording's during shelter check-in.
She hummed one note at him. He recorded it without asking. It's probably on Spotify now. She'll never know.
---
Forms:
Disability: "Describe limitations"
Desta: "I exist in frequencies you don't—"
DENIED
Housing: "Proof of income"
Karim: "Forty years of—"
PENDING (since 2019)
Medical: "Insurance"
Goon Ox: [hoofprint]
ERROR - PLEASE RESTART
Food assistance: "Household size"
Yuki: "Everyone suffering in spectrums—"
They stopped reading at "spectrums"
---
Yuki grabbed my hand yesterday. No, Tuesday. When was Tuesday?
"Listen."
"To?"
"Them getting louder."
I heard traffic. Normal shit.
"Under that. The rejected people. The forms that came back. The benches screaming. It's all—climbing? Rising? What's the word for sound getting more?"
"Louder?"
"No. More present. More refusing to be not heard."
She says when it peaks everyone will see sounds. Or hear colors. Or feel what Karim felt for six minutes thirteen seconds.
"Fourteen seconds," Karim corrects.
"You said thirteen."
"I was wrong. Or right then. Different now."
Time doesn't work right at the intersection. Or it works too right. Every second counted.
---
Yuki's going blind. The seeing-sound thing is killing her regular eyes.
"Good," she said. "Regular sight is boring."
She's teaching me but I'm shit at it. Sometimes maybe purple when Desta hums? Maybe yellow when the Ox wobbles? Maybe I'm making it up.
"Making it up is the first step to seeing it," Yuki says.
Or doesn't say. I can't remember if she said it or I thought she should say it.
---
Night at the intersection:
Desta's at the shelter (curfew). But something purple lingers. Or I'm high. Both possible.
The Ox wobbles through around midnight going nowhere from nowhere.
Karim sleeps by the dead clinic. Still counting to six minutes thirteen seconds. Fourteen. Fifteen. The number grows.
"Maybe one day it'll be six hours," I said.
"No. Always six minutes. But more seconds inside the minutes."
That's not how time works but okay.
---
The pressure ghosts.
I should explain but—no. I can't. Won't. It's just what Yuki calls the sound of everyone rejected by forms, benches, checkpoints, systems. Getting louder she says. Or more visible. Or more something.
"When?" I ask.
"Soon. Or now. Or already happened and we missed it."
Either way Desta hums. The Ox wobbles. Karim counts. Yuki goes blinder. The forms get rejected.
Either way we're here at the intersection that shouldn't exist, being people who don't count, making sounds nobody hears, seeing things that aren't there or are there but shouldn't be or—
I've lost track of what's real.
"Good," Yuki says. "Real was never the point."
---
Coda:
The forms need addresses we don't have. The benches reject bodies that need rest. The systems measure reality in ways that exclude most of reality. But pressure builds. Sound accumulates. Even nothing, if you get enough of it together, becomes something. Sometimes that something hums. Sometimes it wobbles. Sometimes it counts to six minutes and however many seconds it takes for wire to melt. Sometimes it sees what isn't there yet but will be, has to be, because the alternative is everyone staying invisible forever, and physics doesn't allow that much nothing to exist without eventually exploding into something.
