Silent Summer

I go outside to smoke. Sometimes I talk to neighbors, but rarely after dark. After the Winter, I didn’t notice it. I got sick. I’m sure it was the beginning of the pandemic. I was sick for over a month.

But now there’s something akin to the heavy silence of winter at night, and it didn’t register for a while. I mean, so many of us, we have a lot on our minds, right? Who’s got the ability to be observant, you know? We’re sick. Tired, worn out. Scared. Depressed. Broke, out of work. Oh, fuck Ivanka Trump’s new bullshit: start something new, or whatever the hell she says. It’s not constructive nor is it encouraging in the least; she can be translated as, “Hey, poor people, eat cake!” She’s Ayn Rand with botox and silicone. Ain’t no jobs, witch. Not for the millions your father put out of work, so shut the fuck up.

Excuse me. I’m so easily sidetracked these days. I’m aware that there have been cases of COVID-19 presenting in patients as different types of brain dysfunction and I do have some issues with the gray tissues for sure. No delirium, no unusual pain, but memory loss, spotty but, I’m told, definitely there. Like not recognizing some guy that others swore I knew. Fuck, that’s scary. It makes you sick to your stomach, it’s so scary.

Anyway, as I was leading up to and wasn’t getting there, I still trust my base senses. My hearing is reliable, sharper because of my bad sight. Unless I’m dissociated and off in my past getting beaten or fucked.

And at night, I’ve been made very uneasy with the silence around here. I’d hear something at a thousand yards even if it was the croak of a frog, that’s how quiet it is. Trees all around, so many that I have to wear a boonie hat because weird shit drops from the trees. Oh, spiders, tiny bugs, even young slugs. I never heard of slugs climbing trees before but they sure do it to the tree outside of my front door. Its oak. Not the door, the tree. And shit falls off it. Baby squirrels. Geriatric squirrels. Like that. I’ve gotta say, there’s something wrong about that tree. One time I saw a juvenile squirrel fall to the ground right in front of me. It hit on its back with a whump! and ran right back up the fucking tree. I swear, it’s as if something in that tree throws them down. I’ve never seen so many squirrels fall from trees before. In fact, I never saw a squirrel fall from anything until I moved here. Twice, smoking under the tree, I felt something like claws trying to grab me by the hair. I’d say I musta been skipping meds, but there’s no way I did that.

Aside from taking squirrels to the dumpster on the every other blue moon, nothing’s going on. I had a post on my other site, and wrote that when the lockdown started, it was deathly quiet in my neighborhood. I couldn’t hear traffic, not on 29 or 32, nothing.

Of course now, Maryland isn’t in full lockdown. I have, on several occasions, heard assholes on their balcony partying. There’s definitely alcohol involved; lots of it. Lots of it.

And on 4 July I heard fireworks. You know, illegal shit. No displays were going on around here. Not in the whole state, as far as I know. But cherry bombs and roman candles were going off, close, real close. It sounded like a goddamn firefight, and I kept flinching. Each time one went off, I had my guts clench tighter, my neck would not move, and I finally froze, back there again. On my side against something I hoped would cover me from flares with parachutes. And a fucking MG nest that I should never have been anywhere near. Fucking fireworks.

The next night silence returned, but the damage was done. I was a fucking mess. Klonopin hadn’t helped. That took a few days, more klonopin than I should’ve taken, and a shitload of junk food, and I found chocolate chip cookies to be the finest panacea on Earth.

Oh. The silent nights, stretching on from there. Now I’m not saying I hate it. No, at first I found it quite peaceful. But not now. This morning, around 03:30, I went outside to smoke, and the heaviness just swallowed me. Not the heat, not humidity. A separate heaviness unbroken by the slightest sound. No crickets. No cicadas. No frogs.

No traffic.

Nobody out, not teens fucking around throwing rocks at the stop sign. No voices.

No foxes, screaming for whatever it is they scream for. Those little bastards scream like a woman, and they’re smaller than some fucking housecats I’ve seen! Fuckin loud, too.

The deer left the area. One didn’t make it. Got killed by a car.

It’s been too quiet.

And what if the fawn wasn’t hit by a car?

Because at 03:34, I did hear one sound. It has happened before.

About a month ago. I was talking to my neighbor, who was up late and came out to burn one. We heard a knocking sound. One knock. Only there is no door where the sound came from. Just trees.

This time no one else was around and I heard it more clearly. It sounded like someone had a 3-inch diameter wood dowel, about 2-3 feet long, and it struck a fairly big tree with it. Just once.

That ain’t no animal. My skin crawled. I wasn’t scared, but it was weird. Something was there, in the darkest part of the area within sight. No footsteps before or after. I can both see and hear deer over there despite bad sight and prescription sunglasses. No deer were there, and they traverse that spot but never linger; there’s no food there.

And what I thought about was the silence. How unnatural it is. COVID-19 doesn’t account for animals being silent when the summer night should be alive with the chirping of crickets and the songs of cicadas.

I seem to be stuffed with some sense of foreboding. As if nature knows something bad is coming. That’s the heaviness I feel.

Something is going to happen. Something we’re not going to like.

I’ve never been through a summer the nights of which are deathly quiet. When nothing stirs. Except for an occasional knocking of hard wood on a tree trunk.

Sometimes, I just get the worst feeling.