Jacob More (cont.)

the sky: flat black, like the belly of a leviathan passing over the town, sounding out the depths.

his hands like wrens, swooping.

he eased a sigh. "you grow tired of your own voice." his smile, brittle and sad. "silence became my God, but also a devil that plagues me. how terrible it is to be confined to the lower registers of sound!" he dabbed at his brow with a pocket handkerchief and glanced at the splotches, mouth twitching with regret. "i was born and bred in silence - wrapped in it, clothed in it. my father took hold of my hand and led me through its frozen wilderness. we snapped no twigs, crunched no leaves. we passed through this world as though invisible, barely disturbing a thing." he paused, looked at her face, assessing it for the possibility of understanding. she was quiet, though not with curiosity. perhaps that was the moment when the old man felt it, seeing the interest glowing. "i would love you more if you spoke," he said tiredly. "even if it did kill me."

"i have no wish to hurt you," she said, and he jerked back as if struck by lightning, raising his handkerchief to his mouth. he trembled, as if fighting with an earthquake rooted deep in his spine. the shaking calmed, and he opened his eyes. in their depths was a golden ecstasy.

"thank you," he whispered. his voice sounded like sandpaper. "i will treasure that sound."

she smiled, and made a motion with her hand for him to continue.

"my poor, poor mother..."

he took to writing, just like his father had, years before. his adolescence was a forest of notebooks & a landfill of looseleaf pages. he lacked the orderliness that had seemed to plague his father - his room was a constant shifting dervish of frenzied pages, in no particular order. where Jacob More had taken to philosophy & theological study, Adolfo More took to poetry. he kept a small black address book by his bedside and did not fill it with addresses, but rather words - extraordinary words, the shape of them on the page, the space they filled. each was written carefully, transcribed from the place he had discovered them - for example, from a sheaf of typewritten pages found in his father's collection, the word "apotheosis."

it was from this wild and unruly obsession with language that Adolfo learned poetry, combining words that somehow fit together. he became a tailor of words, stitching them together over and over again, discovering their patterns and how they fit together. at night, under the covers, he whispered them to himself. he was thirteen years old, and just starting to feel the drop in his throat, not understanding why his voice kept splintering on certain sounds. this was his private reverence, his only joy - but still, something was lacking. he felt empty, hollow, after he had finished, and sometimes would weep miserably into sleep, always eventually drifting off with a wet place beneath his cheek. there was a missing place in his eyes when he looked in the mirror in the mornings, checking for the evidence of a beard like his father's - and that's when he remembered. he'd seen that emptiness before: in his father's eyes, a same pitiless darkness. though worn & weathered, he recognized it across the breakfast table that morning, shrouded in silence save for the clinking of silverware against the plates.

"Father," he said, "why are we silent?"

his mother flung her hands to her ears, blood rushing to her face. he had never seen anger as he saw in his father's face at that moment - it bloomed within him like a volcano's gouting lava, accumulating, hardening, and piling atop itself until it reached his mouth - he opened the gate of his teeth and abruptly snapped them closed again. he laid the silver down, knuckles clenched around them, and stood, raising himself with both hands like a thundercloud. he did not speak, but fixed his eyes on his son - terrible and disappointed eyes. he came around the table, slow steps towards Adolfo, and laid his hand on his son's shoulder, pressing down hard before clenching into a fist, hauling him upright and nearly knocking over the chair. the last thing Adolfo saw before he was dragged out of the kitchen was his mother's mute, pleading eyes, fixed on her husband's back, and the seed of fury somewhere deep within her, banging around like a fireball inside of her.