EDIT: I've posted an updated/finished version, but left this one in case anyone ever comes across this and is remotely interested in how things progress. Though heaven knows I couldn't post every version of things like this. It'd get ridiculous quick.
Dear Critiquers: First off, thanks very much for agreeing to take a look. I have never attempted to write a deaf character before and, to be honest, have only ever met a few deaf people in my life. I do know some ASL (enough for fingerspelling and probably about 20-30 words), though it is now useless to me as I've moved to the UK and BSL is quite different. At any rate, the story is set in the US, though I don't specify exactly where. Please feel free to completely tell me off if you think I'm getting anything wrong with anything from syntax (especially syntax! I was trying to convey somewhat proper ASL syntax without going overboard so that readers with no knowledge of it could figure out what I was trying to do) to thoughts to whatever. I'm not going to say anything else about the character as hopefully who she is comes through in the story. I'd decided to write it in first person, which wound up being rather challenging considering I couldn't just stick in dialogue for other characters as you normally would because she wouldn't be able to hear it. I've spent some time reading articles and watching videos, etc. but there's only so much research can tell you. You may read it and think, hey, this isn't bad. Or you may read it and go, girl, you suck. Totally okay either way, though more specific feedback is appreciated. :-)
That said, I would actually consider this to be VERY rough first draft. The edges need to be smoothed. There may be typos. So please don't think of it as a polished, finished piece. It's got a lot of work that needs to be done. I wouldn't even normally let people see a piece in this state, but I'm in a bit of a time crunch.
Anyway, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. You can post comments here or DM me on reddit, whatever is easier.
Audible Magic
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I’ve known Becky since
I was seven. She’s been talking me into things for fifteen years. Things like
moving to the city without finding a job first, dying my hair purple, and that
very ill-advised tattoo of a twerking penguin that I will never, ever let my
dad see.
She knew me back
when I played tuba in our middle school band, back when I thought I was the
coolest girl on the block for being able to dah
dah dah dum da da dum da da dum out a recognizable version of the Imperial
Death March. Back when you couldn’t find me without my Beats on. A lifetime
ago.
We’d gone to our
first concert together when we were thirteen. All the other girls were mad over
One Direction but not us—we were
above that. No big box stadium shows for us. No boy bands. No, we snuck into
some dive of a bar to listen to a band so bad that they wound up splitting up on
stage because the bass player was falling down drunk and was, apparently,
sleeping with both the lead singer and the drummer. I can still remember the
smell of the beer and the sweat of the crowd. The smell of doing something you
weren’t supposed to.
Yeah, Bec can talk
me into anything. She can even talk me into things like going to a concert I have
no desire to go to.
But she was right.
I had promised. And the tequila had definitely had something to do with it, but
also the twinkle in her eye whenever she talked about Tom. Bec had incredibly
bad taste in men and the jury was still out on him, at least as far as I was
concerned. Sure, she’d met him at the grocery store instead of on Tinder, but
he wore his baseball cap backwards and he worked in finance. It wasn’t promising.
He’d been there buying avocados and granary bread with so many seeds in it he’d
have been followed by squirrels if he carried it through the park.
Bec was only
fifteen minutes late picking me up, which didn’t leave her any time to make me
change out of my most comfortable pair of jeans and t-shirt. She was wearing a
little black dress and some thigh-high boots. She eye-rolled hard at me, swiped
some heavy black eyeliner along my eyes, and twenty minutes later she was
pushing me to the front of the line at some club I’d never heard of. Clubs
weren’t my thing. Too dark to see who you’re with. Too many people. Too much.
The bouncer was
huge, with a nose like a potato. He held up a hand to stop Bec’s full frontal
assault and pointed at first us and then somewhere in the vicinity of the back
of the line. It snaked around the block.
Bec just smiled at
him and pulled two lanyards with passes out of her bag. She threw one around my
neck and put one on her own. No telling how she’d managed to pull those. It was
nearly always better not to ask.
The guy that had
been first in line didn’t look happy with us. I smiled at him and gave the
universal shrug of sorry dude, what can
you do, amiright?
The bouncer poked
me in the shoulder and I jumped.
“Hey, man,” said
Bec, signing to me at the same time, “don’t get handsy. She didn’t hear you.
She’s deaf.” She turned to me and signed I.D.
show.
I nodded and pulled
my driver’s license out of my pocket and held it out to him. He tilted his head
to the side as he looked at it, then said something to Bec that I couldn’t
catch any of.
She pursed her lips
at him, signing her answer at the same time. “Yeah, she can drive. She’s deaf,
not blind.” I hoped she hadn’t also said the idiot she’d added onto what she’d signed to me. He was way too
large to insult.
He bent over to
peer at me like I was a bug under microscope. “Can you read my lips?” he asked.
That phrase right
there is one of the only ones I can consistently lip read from a stranger, but
only because I’ve been asked so many times.
“No,” I said. I can
lip read Bec a good deal of the time, since I know her so well, though I don’t
have to since she’s been signing with me for years. Half the time I know what
she’s going to say before she says it. But other people? Not so much. Especially
since the hipster trend took over and every other guy out there had a porcupine
growing on his chin or a handlebar mustache that belonged back in the Wild West.
He stared at me,
processing that. I got the feeling his job didn’t normally require him to do
much thinking. And he probably didn’t get a lot of deaf people coming to shows,
not at a club like this. The chance of a place this size having an interpreter
was slim to none. He finally spoke. “_____ how ___ ___ know what __ ____ ____?”
That was all I got from his lips, but I could guess what the rest of it was.
“Because everyone
asks me that,” I said. Seriously. If I had a dollar…
I could even guess
what he was going to say next, but this time he turned his attention back to
Bec like I wasn’t even there.
Now she was
starting to look pissed and I was starting to regret that she’d talked me into
coming. “And what exactly are deaf people supposed
to sound like?” she told him. Yeah, he’d asked what I thought he would. I wasn’t
sure why she was getting so wound up about it though. I’d had this conversation
about a million times before and she’d been there for many of them. It was
annoying, but it was normal.
“Bec,” I said
sweetly, “Tom’s already in there waiting, right? Can we go in now?” I smiled up
at the bouncer. Full charm. Lots of teeth. I wasn’t going to go into the full
story for his benefit. How I’d lost my hearing when I was a teenager. How I
could still remember what the sound of my voice was like. I remembered how it
felt to speak, the feel of my tongue against my teeth, the breath in my lungs,
the movement of my lips. How I practiced enunciating every word now. How people
told me I sounded more like a news announcer than like I’d used to.
I’d gone deaf, not
stupid. I could do anything the big dumb bohunk could do, other than hear. And
throw people across a room. I wasn’t really sized for that.
Some of what I was
thinking must have come through, because he shuffled uncomfortably out of our
way and waved us in. I grabbed Bec and pulled her through the door and into
Hell.
At least, that’s
what it felt like. The cool night air, gone, replaced by a stagnant stale,
almost antiseptic smell layered over with perfume and alcohol. It was dimly
lit, tiny puddles of reddish light from uselessly artsy light fixtures around
the outside edge, while the center of the large room pulsed with flashing strobe
lights. There was a bar at one end of the space and a stage at the other.
Clusters of tables and booths on one side, but not nearly enough for the number
of people that were already inside. How were they going to fit the rest of the
people in line? How were we going to find Tom? Why had I let her talk me into coming? She knew I hated crowded
spaces filled with strangers.
One of my questions
was answered almost immediately. Bec made a beeline across the room, dragging
me with her. Her guy-dar was on full throttle. She’d spotted Tom all the way
across the room standing near one side of the stage.
He was two-handed
with drinks, sipping something whiskey-brown out of a glass in one hand and holding
a blue martini with a plethora of fruit sticking out of it in the other. It
looked like a Bec kind of drink. She was surprisingly frou-frou. The more
things poking out of it, the better. He handed the concoction to her with a
smile as we came up to him.
“You remember
Callie?” she said to him and gave him a very unsubtle elbow in the side. He
smiled and waved at me and managed to sign a passable how are you to me. Okay, he had potential. More than Bec’s normal
picks, anyway. The last guy she’d dated wouldn’t even make eye contact with me.
Good I signed back, saying it out loud at the same time. I didn’t
want to make him work too hard.
“Great spot,” Bec
said, nodding at the stage. “Right, Callie?”
“Perfect.”
Whatever. I pointedly spent some time looking at the instruments on the stage
as she got down to greeting him in a more personal manner. There was a well-loved
bass guitar on a stand right in front of us, a couple of faded stickers
decorating it. Drum kit, center stage towards the back. A red guitar on the
other side. A single microphone down front, another guitar next to it. Huge
black speakers on either side on stands. No fancy set dressing. Just the
instruments. Well, you couldn’t say we’d changed much since we were young,
though this club was both better and worse than that dive bar we’d gone to for
our first foray into live music. I’d bet the drinks were a lot more expensive
here, that was for sure.
The house lights
flashed. I looked around and saw that the room had filled up even more. It was
a wall of people behind us, undulating like a beast, like they were one body
with many arms and legs and mouths. It was even hotter now, like a wave of heat
washing over me. Hell. Seventh level.
I looked at Bec,
ready to make a face at her but she was smiling at me, so happy. I couldn’t do
it. “Showtime!” she said. Love love love
she signed to me. Get ready. Dance you
me. Here they come! She flung an arm around Tom’s waist.
I turned back to the stage, putting the crowd
at my back. The band was coming out. All guys. But there was no way they were a
boy band; not unless boy bands had gone sexy and dangerous since I’d paid any
attention to them. Harry Styles eat your heart out.
The bass player was
dressed like me, t-shirt and jeans, though somehow they managed to not look
basic on him. Maybe it was the hair. It was long-ish and tied back in a
ponytail. No facial hair, unlike the lead singer, who was sporting a full-on hipster
beard. I wouldn’t be lip-reading him. The drummer was tattooed and shirtless.
The guitar player had on tight leather pants and some shiny shirt. Silk? God,
he had to be melting in the heat.
I could feel the
crowd behind me now as they clapped and shouted. Like a heartbeat. A drum beat.
No, that was the drum beat. The drummer
had started playing. And the bassist too. It vibrated inside me, a drawn out
thrumming I could feel in my chest. In my bones. Boom. Boom. Boom. The speakers were quivering. So
was I.
Boom. Bah Bah Boom. Like a race car had suddenly let loose
inside my veins, gone screaming through the bends of my heart and come out the
other side. I could feel the music.
It was there. Like I could reach out and touch it. Cradle it. Take it inside
me, but I didn’t need to. It was already there.
I put my hands on the
stage in front of me, near one of the speakers and closed my eyes. Yes. There it was, the pulse of the
song. I stayed that way, nodding my head in time to the music, feeling it all
the way down to my toes, like I was inside
the song. A minute, forever, too long, not enough, I wasn’t sure and then the
song was over. I opened my eyes as the thrumming left me. The singer was
talking. I didn’t know about what. I didn’t care. He should shut up and sing.
I tapped Bec on the
arm. “I was in the song,” I said to her and saw her shake her head and cup her
hand to her ear. The crowd was too loud. She couldn’t hear me. Song I signed Music I am. Was I making sense? Beautiful!
I didn’t care. Feel music inside. Boom. Boom. My hand to my chest. She smiled
at me and laughed. Good good she
signed. Did she get it? Did she understand?
We could talk about
it later. Another song was starting.
I
closed my eyes and this time I leaned into the stage, wishing I could take my
shoes off and feel it even more. I didn’t know what the song was, but I did at
the same time. It felt like I remembered. It felt like music and freedom and
doing something you shouldn’t but you oh-so-should.
I kept trying to
explain it to Bec between songs, but I wasn’t sure she could understand. I feel it too she signed. Band good. Song good.
It wasn’t good. It
was amazing. It was magic.
Bec touched my arm.
Last song. Too soon. I wasn’t ready
for it to be over. Next band half hour
she continued. Drink time. I nodded.
I felt like I could stand her all night, so long as the music kept going.
Okay, I signed. Bar you me
drinks. Shut up now I need to feel
it. She laughed and nodded and went back to Tom.
The last song began
and this time I kept my eyes open, wanting to take it all in. The drummer,
sweat shining on him. The guitar player, down on his knees. The lead singer,
cradling the microphone like a lover. I wished I knew what the words were. I’d
ask Bec later. And the bassist—I looked up at him to find him staring down at
me with his dark eyes. He smiled as our eyes caught and held. He took a step or
two toward me and then knelt down right in front of me, still playing. He
nodded at me. Nodded at my hands pressed to the stage. What? What did he want? Was
I in the way? Crap. I lifted my hands and would have pulled them back, but
without missing a beat he grabbed my hand with one of his and put it flat against
the bass. Then he went on playing, nodding his head in time with the music.
Oh. My fingers
thrummed. I felt like it was in time with my heart or maybe it was the other
way around. I smiled up at him. He had no idea. He was making magic and I—I was
feeling it. Buh buh buh bum ba bum
[bit more about
their moment and the song ending]
[after set, go to
bar, bassist finds her there, they talk using iphone notes app, he doesn’t say
anything stupid or annoying like the bouncer]
He held up a single
finger and smiled, saying something. One? One minute? One moment? Then he
disappeared into the crowd. I’d lost track of the crush while we were talking,
but now I felt it again. People pressing against me on every side. An elbow in
my back as someone walked by, pushing me into the bar.
[she feels a bit
overwhelmed, more setting the scene around the bar, then he comes back]
His smile had gone
a bit crooked. He squared his shoulders and raised his hands and—signed. Date, two-of-us, go-to you want you?
I was so surprised
that I didn’t respond. Just gaped at him like an idiot. Then I saw Bec over his
shoulder, beaming at me. He must have gone to find her. Asked her to show him some
signs.
He lightly touched
my forearm to bring my attention back to him. You I like, he signed slowly. Together
music?
Together music, I signed back.
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