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The Amazing Disassembled Voice of Chucky Renfroe
On his 16th birthday Chucky Renfroe learned to talk directly to human beings.
In the awkward part of his life puberty had dissected his voice like it had with many young children, but somewhere in that pickled hurricane it had gotten distracted and never found its way back to the task which it had started. This important task being the re-assemblage of Chucky Renfroe's voice of course. He had all the parts needed for a human voice, gathered and condensed in the precise area needed for proper function, but together these parts held no structure. They simply lie languidly around in a secret area of his lungs like dogs in the sun. None of these parts, which overlapped and piled upon each other, knew of one another. They had the vision of a mole and were each completely devoid of will of movement. All the pieces needed for a voice where gathered in the mystical part of his lungs like living corpses piled in a dark room with breathing walls.
No one knew what to think of Chucky's sudden devotion to silence. At first his family and friends were annoyed and irritated with him thinking that he was only seeking attention in a hateful way.
"Quit playing games, Chucky!" They would say to him, or "Why do you insist on being difficult, Chucky?"
But after the first month went by they began to worry about their Chucky. He was never a talkative boy but he had always known how to use his voice when he had to and never hesitated around family and friends. When they took him to see doctors none of them knew what had exactly happened to his voice. Not a single one, no matter how gifted the doctor or how far they would have to travel, none of them could provide an answer. He had a perfectly good set of lungs they would say, give him time, he'll come around. But despite the encouraging of these doctors Chucky found that he had a small box of living corpses surrounded by breathing walls where his voice should have been.
It's wasn't as if Chucky had forgotten how to speak, not at all. In fact, Chucky's mouth and lips had movement, only nobody but Chucky was able to hear the sounds he wished to make. To Chucky the only thing that had changed was the world; he woke up one day to a world that was unable to hear him. He was able to make all the sounds and noises he had always been able to, but suddenly he found that as soon as his attempts at communication hit air, they dissolved and evaporated soundlessly like the innocence of young boys in a rich man's war, never reaching a single ear.
It wouldn't be until he gave up on the navigation of his words through the world's air that he would learn to flawlessly communicate with his fellow human beings. His mother had bought him varying sized notebooks, pens, and books on sign language and placed them generously around his room and areas of their house to encourage her son, but he found interest in none of these things. To Chucky there were no inadequacies in his speech so he felt no need for himself to resort to such measures. If any thing needed fixing, he thought, it was the way the world heard him, or failed to hear him.
He was in retreat from the world deep within the sunken footsteps of its steady green fields when he learned to talk directly to human beings. He had his headphones on comforting his insides where he heard and kept the most, his feet where off the ground and his toes where pointed at the sky. Concentration painted lines in his face as he tried making his feet and toes blend in with the atmosphere of the pacing sentinels which took up the sky until they where all dinner guests, sitting together at one well-made table. He was like a twisted piece of human machinery, with his toes imbedded in the sky and his arms reaching out at a length far past an imaginary line of scrimmage, in and out of mud and color, frosted by the moonlight which powered him. Chucky listened loyally as the sounds left his headphones, curling down through his ears and into the parts where most of Chucky lay hidden. He continued to lay there in the sunken footsteps of the world's green fields, growing in power, stretched and hidden, when he realized how flawed our words were as human beings. Tiny bodies winking in and out of shapes from deep inside, hopeful to be realized as one of any endless beautiful possibilities, but once ejected they find themselves defenseless in the dripping air of the world becoming pasteurized under the boiling gaze of a utterly maddening land. When their destination is reached they find themselves peeled and shriveled so far past their conception that they are barely heard, barely felt. They are inserted into new bodies a dusty mummy of what they once were, and far, so very far from what they had hoped to be.
Chucky Renfroe opened his mouth, closed his eyes and mourned the dirty journey human thoughts traveled in their epic struggle to be realized in a world that hushes them with stiff cracked hands. He knew that the sounds and words that entered his body from within the headphones were easier to grasp honestly than those making the helpless journey between bodies, but he also knew that they were filtered still by the giant toothed human machinery that crunched them perfectly into those trusty headphones of his. So, with his mouth still open, Chucky Renfroe breathed out what remained of the world he lived in, held his breath and became a hollow piece of pure human sound.
Chucky Renfroe spoke to the world with invisible words assembling like phantoms from secret dimensions on the insides of ears.
This is what they heard:
"The voice you are hearing is the voice of a human being living in the world. It took great care to reach you personally and honestly, woven within and without the sub pockets of the our existence, in a precise way to meet you intact. It reaches you exactly as it leaves me; still imbedded with all the delicate power that shapes it. As I have learned to accomplish this, I am hoping that in the future some of you may as well, but for now I want to tell you how I feel. I feel that as human beings, no matter how close we get to each other, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, we are all doomed to define the greatest distance in the universe between these bodies of ours. The things that we think of that bring us together are really just constructs of our mind, a culmination of our weak nature to cover those gaps between one another that reflect up into our eyes. But I want to tell you about hope, I want to plant a seed in you to give us all a fighting chance. Forget about words that sound like Love or Passion and those things that bury our feet deeper in the dirt and mud where we find ourselves. Open up your eyes, and let your voice mimic the mysticism inside of you, lift yourself out of the dirt and understand that the world does not dictate your voice but it is in fact your voice that dictates the world! Know that the shortest distance from one point to the next is not in a straight light and learn to fold reality over onto it's self shaving away the illusions, then do it again, and again and again until you and I overlap. And when you find yourself whispering you find that you are no longer whispering in my ear but inside my soul. It is at this point that we can truly communicate as separate human beings and hear each other as if we were one. I can hear you as you were meant to be and you can hear me as I was meant to be heard. Memorize this sound and know as you continue living in this world that tries to snuff us out that it is alive and exists and prospers inside all of us everywhere."
As the last few words came out of Chucky Renfroe he passed out and fell asleep in the giant sunken footstep of the green field. When he awoke early the next morning he unfolded his exhausted body and lined it perpendicular to the ground quietly as he let the new rays of the rising sun warm the outer layer of his skin. As Chucky took his first steps back to his home at the bottom of the hill there was left behind deep within the sunken footsteps of those steady green fields a collection of living corpses which were once surrounded in breathing walls.
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