Whisper Read Free

sound of my loneliness, clear and nerve-tingling. As I listened to the music, my heart squeezed itself small, flattened into a straight line and compressed into nothingness: a tick, a flea, the point of a pencil.
    â€œThat’s the sound a violin can make,” Nathanael said.
    I looked down at the instrument in Nathanael’s hand. He lifted it up, fit it beneath his chin and drew the long stick with hairs across the strings. His fingers pushed against the strings in various places and different notes emerged. His hands were stretched out long, the muscles taut, and when I looked at his face, I saw a tear make a snail’s trail down his cheek. He abruptly placed the violin in the case and walked to his hut. The goat, Naya, bleated and followed him.
    I understood why my mother had given it to me. The violin was me, nasal and foreign, but somewhere within its depths something beautiful resided. I looked at Jeremia. He looked at me. And on my lap, the new reject, the beautiful baby, closed her eyes, smiled and passed gas.
    â€œYou two must be related,” Jeremia said, squeezing my calf muscle.

Two
    In the morning, Jeremia was gone. His time had been approaching. He disappeared in cycles, like the moon, and then reappeared. I knew that in two years, when he turned nineteen, he wouldn’t come back. He would vanish like the four rejects before him, not one of them returning to our little camp in the woods. They went to more civilized places where the trees grew crooked in their search for sun and where the crickets couldn’t be heard. They journeyed through the forest, traversed the creeks and joined hundreds, thousands, of people gathered in places with no birds. Nathanael said the city was an unforgiving concrete slab, full of so much noise that it was hard to hear yourself. He said the air was toxic and a smell—dark and evil—caused sickness like the tendrils of ivy, touching and choking everything.
    I didn’t understand what, in that cold world of square buildings, unnatural light and illness, was so wonderful and so precious that the other rejects would abandon the only home they’d ever known. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever make that choice. It wasn’t bad, living in our camp, just isolated.

    That first morning after the baby arrived, Nathanael and Eva were sitting together on the log when I stumbled from my hut, the sun already above my head. The baby, strapped to my chest, had woken me every time I fell asleep, and during the night when I had looked through my window, the moon had seemed not to move at all. Old cloth diapers, yellowed and worn with age—saved from when I first came to the camp, from when Jeremia first came to the camp and even from those before Jeremia—had been tossed haphazardly in front of my hut and required washing. The baby needed something more substantial than water. She slept and woke, slept and woke.
    Eva hiccupped and sniff led through tears. At first I thought it was because Jeremia was gone, but then I saw her hand. Porcupine barbs were thrust deep into her palm. Nathanael shakily twisted them out with his thumb and first finger. When he saw me, he moved over, and I sat next to Eva. She was trying so hard to be brave, her chubby cheeks red and mottled from tears and held breath. She bit down on her lower lip and looked at me through watery eyes. Her webbed hands were red and swollen.
    I twisted each barb and then removed it with a quick yank. She jerked every time I pulled one out, but she didn’t run away nor did she hide her hand.
    â€œJeremia left because of me,” she said.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYes. He told me only stupid people touch porcupines, and I’m the stupidest person he’s ever met.” Eva was a creature of the forest. She sang with the birds, jumped with the grasshoppers, fed squirrels from her hands. It made sense that she would try to touch a porcupine. Nathanael sat on the other side of Eva