It’s still so quiet.
I’ve been here waiting for hours. I’m content to do this, this is what I do for them all. If I missed anything, a vibration or a sound, I would never forgive myself. It would be so wasteful to let it go unheard, unfelt. I can’t hear their hearts but I can hear their voice and their panic. I can hear the flesh of their hands get heavier and more swollen as they pound and pull. The eventual squish and wetness of their skin breaking open to stain the metal they can’t see.
Sometimes they scream and scream until their voices pull like knotted rope from their throats. You can hear the flesh protesting, the grip of the words no longer letting things past. They slowly dissolve into near silent sobs, the only sound deep toad-gulps that are meant to be burps but they don’t have the air to spare.
The silence is so twin to me though, I almost prefer it. You can hear the gentle drag of their fingers, the care taken in the slim crevice of the jam. The breathes they carefully regulate, one breath in - two. three - one breath out - two. three. The suction of the lungs, the stream of the nose, the rhythm they need to stay upright. With these, sometimes I have to slide up and press the whole of me to the slits. I have to rip myself over the cold roughness of the hinges and let my chest lay flat against the surface.
I can almost feel their breath on my face.
A few times I have whispered a word. I have whispered a word into the crack and pressed my forehead to the cold as their responding screams of hope cause my face to heat. I’m embarrassed for them, for their desperation. Don’t they know if I could I would have by now? They cannot possibly believe I can. To release the door from its form would be to end it. To cease it to be. I need this.
Why would anyone be so selfish? To take this from me?
They won’t have the chance.
Tonight is a sweet night for listening. There’s warmth here. There’s calm. The sun had shown upon the door all evening and the metal still resonates with it. The forgotten blacktop has cracks I can dig my fingers into and pull, tear if it comes to that. There are spots already where the earth has reclaimed it, the spaces widened and returned to whence they came by my struggles, my want to rend.
I will need to empty it this time. I will need to start over. The sludge at the foot is deep and adds to the desperation within. They go down first, it is the natural way of stairs. They go down and the cold deepens and the barest light they were unaware they had disappears completely. The metal of the stairs clangs and thrums with their steps. They go, down, down, their footsteps heavy and thick, making the hot sound of a metal slide in summer under bare feet. I imagine the flakes of the rusted paint brushing away and sticking to their fingers like the food you drop in for fish, a tank they are trapped within. They have no idea of their absolute confine.
There’s detritus upon the stairs. I know this because I have entered, left things where they fall. I soak in the air and imagine the scenes that created the mayhem. A shoe crusted into an order, dirt and mess cementing it with the heel pressed tight into the crease of the joined walls. I have felt the chains of necklaces within the rails, the charm caught now twined in a web to catch fingers and hems. There’s hair in a clump on the wall here, the texture moldy and mossed from the continued wet that permeates the stairwell. Someone crashed here, headlong into the wall. Their blood would have been puddled, but this has washed away. The force it must have taken to hold for so long to its spot.
It must have been the one that came up again. Slurred and spoke of nonsense. This had grown quiet eventually. I had sent the flood anyway. They must go to the bottom, join the others in the quiet.
They all have to go join the others.
I need the quiet back.