Toe in the Water

The Voices, The Voices

The Voices, The Voices

For quite some time now, I have been devoid of inspiration, particularly on the short story front. I don’t blame such times on any supposed departure of a mythical muse but rather on the thought that a period of frenetic production is bound to be followed by a time of recovery in which very little is produced.

During July, I was saved to some extent by the coincidence of three poetry challenges/contests occurring at the same time. One of these, The Daily Poem, was for July only and it has deserted me now, leaving only the rebooted 24 Syllables and Promptly Poetry to keep me going. Twenty-four is no longer a daily event, being spread out to about three prompts per week (a sensible conservation of effort by the owner), and Promptly is a weekly thing. Which leaves me with considerable time to fill with my lack of inspiration.

Last night, however, I realised that I have had the makings of a horror story in my head for many months. It would be horror, of course, since I’m currently trying to stay away from SCREAMS!!! (my feelings of duty toward it were devouring what little capacity I had left for original creation). But beggars can’t be choosers and I shall run with this idea to see what results from it.

Here in the oven of a typical New England summer, we have been running fans to maintain a livable temperature in the house. Recently the air conditioning units had to be hauled out and thrown into the fray. And the result is an environment dominated by the constant noise of fans.

It was my wife who turned to me in the midst of this and remarked, “Do you hear the voices in the noise of the fans?”

Now, I have heard those voices for decades and assumed that I was the only one who could. I figured that they were some weird effect of vibrations in the air creating the effect of voices within the fans’ song. Either that or just a human need to imagine something recognisable in the wall of unremitting sound produced by the fans. It might be similar to my tendency to discern faces within abstract patterns on walls and floors, something that I already knew I shared with many others.

And now it seems that I’m not the only one who can hear the voices of the fans. Maybe we all can. But it was only last night that it occurred to me that there is the making of a short story in these voices. There are several theories that might fit the production of such a phenomenon (note the use of the singular form - the plural is “phenomena”) and some of them could be decidedly creepy or psychologically threatening. No doubt I will just begin the thing without having chosen an explanation and allow the story to tell me where to go as it is written.

So there we are - two birds with one stone. The tale of a break in my desert of inspiration and something to awaken my blog from its two-week sleep (it’s bad when you don’t have enough going on in your head at least to write in the blog). Now all I have to do is write the story.


Word Count: 551