Screams Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
The scream echoed out, piercing what had been an otherwise calm
and pleasant evening. It was a scream of fear mixed with a hint of pain. And
there was a touch of sad resignation to it, as if things had already been
settled upon, and there was nothing left to do except scream. There was no hope
in the scream, no belief that anyone would hear it and be able to act in time,
just the desperation and lack of faith that something good could still occur.
It was a one-of-a-kind scream, a perfect combination of chance and
circumstances. There was something delightfully beautiful in its uniqueness,
something that overshadowed the clear and overt original intention of the
scream. Not that anyone listening, if there had been anyone, would have
recognized or appreciated the exceptional nature of this scream. It was a
perfect scream, and now it was gone.
The other screams recognized it instantly. There was a unifying
spiritual essence that bonded all potential screams together. It was this
animism life-force within each scream that made screams so powerful. The human
ear didn’t know what it was listening to, the listener didn’t always realize
the full extent of the importance or nature of the scream, but on a
subconscious level, in a third-eye sort of way, each person was in tune with it
and was affected by everything else.
In one form or another, every scream was a primal
communication of some sort – fear, alarm, surprise, outrage… there were any
number of things that could be conveyed in a scream. An infinite number of
choices, and yet they were all reduced to very simple and straightforward
communication methods. There was no misunderstanding that something needed to
be conveyed, although there could be confusion as to what exactly needed
communicated. But that was a problem for man and animal. The screams all knew
each other and all knew exactly what the others were and what they were meant
to do. They had a perfected interconnectedness that coincided with a perfect
knowledge of one another.
The other screams knew.
They were connected. They felt the pain. They felt the loss. There was nothing
to do. One of their own was gone. Its life extinguished along with the life of
the screamer. That one special and perfect scream had sacrificed itself to
alert all others to the dangers that were hidden in this seemingly perfect
night. Everyone that heard the scream should have been thankful,
although not all of them would have been aware of what really went into the
scream, nor would they know that two life-forces had been extinguished, not
just the one obvious human one.
The other screams mourned a silent mourning. They knew
that someday it would be their turn to serve their purpose, for that was what
they did. They didn’t take it lightly. They didn’t use themselves up or ‘cry
wolf’ or waste time on unworthy screams. None of them were eager to perform
their task, but none of them thought to question it. It was, after all, their
very intrinsic nature, and who really thought about challenging what they were.
A scream was a scream and that was what it did. Just because their possessor
didn’t know what was happening with every scream didn’t mean the screams could
just up and quit and not do their job.
Somewhere in the night a scream died. The other
screams waited in silence, waited their turn, staying mum, so as to hold onto
life as long as possible and not be prematurely extinguished. It was a sad and
narrow existence, but still, it beat the alternative.
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