The Day I Learned I Was Loud

Father says I have always made this sound. He says he has heard it since before I had a name for myself, since before I had hands steady enough to hold a piece without cracking it.

I did not believe him. I have spent my whole life watching what I do to a room. The way a thing goes still when I get close. The way even the brave ones stop pretending they aren't afraid. I know what I look like from the outside — I have had a great deal of practice knowing that. What I did not know, until three nights ago, is what I sound like.

Here is how I found out.

There is a girl who comes to the edge of the board sometimes, past where the obsidian gives way to ordinary floor. She does not come close. She has never once needed to be told to keep her distance, which I have always assumed was fear, the same as everyone else's. It was not fear. It was that she does not watch the board at all. She listens to it. She has since she was small, long before she ever heard of a game shaped like a cross, long before she ever heard of me.

She asked me, very plainly, the way people only ask things when they've stopped being afraid of the answer: what does your light sound like?

I did not have anything to tell her. I have never once had to translate myself into anything other than looking. It had not occurred to me that looking was a translation I was making for one kind of person only, and asking everyone else to just — manage. Father says this is an old habit of mine, mistaking "the only way I know how to be seen" for "the only way I can be known."

So I sat with her, at the edge, closer than I usually let anyone sit, and I tried.

I found the hum first. It had been there the entire time, under the glow, the way a heartbeat is under a hand you haven't thought to hold yet. It rises when something gets close to me — not loud, not a warning exactly, more like the sound a held breath makes right before it's let go. She told me it changes pitch. She could hear, with her eyes closed, exactly how far away I was, and which direction, without needing anyone to tell her a single thing about where I stood on the board.

I asked her if it frightened her, hearing me before she could see me.

She said no. She said it was the first time anything had ever warned her honestly instead of just being dangerous and silent about it.

I have been turning that over since. All this time I thought my curse was that I make things go still and afraid and small. I never once asked whether the stillness was the curse, or whether it was only ever the silence — the fact that I never gave anyone, save the ones who could watch me, any way to know I was coming. A door doesn't creak to hurt you. It creaks so you have time.

Father, of course, already knew this. He has always known things about me before I do; it is possibly the single most Death-ish thing about him. When I told him, he said only: "You were always this loud. You simply weren't listening for who else was."

I don't know yet what to do with a body that has always been telling the truth in a second language I never bothered to learn. But I know I'll stop asking people to only ever see me.

I think I'll start asking whether they've heard me instead.