Angry Voices

         A crack of light seeps through the door into the dark room. A boy sits in the corner on his bed clutching a blanket to his chest. He's covered but shivers nonetheless as the door creaks in a slight manner.
         However what frightens him most are the voices he hears from outside the room--they scare him more than any night monster could. The voices are familiar to him; angry and incensed, the voices sound so different from their usual tone that he wonders if they belong to the same people.
         Then everything is quiet. Only the small amount of light in the room is left to the boy. No sound, no voices, all he can sense is the slight warmth of his blanket and the ribbon of light from the door. Maybe the voices and the anger were products of his drowsiness--yes, that sounds right.
         Now fully awake, he gingerly climbs down from his bed. It's quiet enough for him to hear the pats of his pajama-covered feet on the carpet. He walks to the door and manages to open the door with only the smallest of squeaks. In the long, dark hallway, the boy opens some of the windows. The house is different for the boy; although he has lived in it since he could walk, this particular night has made it silent and foreign. He walks to his parent's bedroom but the door is open and nobody is inside. Dread floods the boy and he feels his chest tighten like a bow. Something is off, something is wrong.
         He returns to his room and tells himself that they will be there in the morning, smiling and joking as they always are. He closes the door and lies back on his bed in an effort to sleep. After all, he would need his energy for the weekend! His parents had promised him last week waffles for breakfast on both days and a trip to the zoo. They hadn't mentioned their promise to him since, but he trusted that they would remember.
         He had a lot of faith in his parents. While the house had been quiet recently, the boy could remember only a few months ago on their last trip to the zoo. The house had been abuzz with their excitement so that they seemed to leap and jump wherever they went. He was sure that tomorrow would be the trip that would revitalize his parents to their former spirit.
         In fact it was not as if his parents had never been in a slump before. They were always over dumb things too--stuff the boy didn't really see the point of like food and something called taxes. They always had enough food anyways; he didn't even mind skipping dinner every now and then.
         Anyways, now it was time to sleep. The boy felt tired of thinking and wanted desperately to stop. But quietly--they begin as murmurs--the voices start again. It was something insignificant, mice, insects, pests, but the voices rise and rise to their previous ardor.
         The voice of a man comes booming through the door shouting in a frenzied state. A feminine voice screams back hate and venom--it's too loud, loud enough to drive the boy mad.
         He buries his head against his pillow and wraps it around as if he were trying to suffocate himself. Pants from the boy fill the room while he wishes that he's fallen asleep already. And when he dutifully acknowledges that the voices are not a product of his dreams, he begs for someone to stop them. Yet for God, they would not stop.
         He yells out from his room,
         "Stop, stop, STOP!"
He beats the covers of his bed with balled fists and yells at the unrelenting voices until his voice is hoarse and his pillow is wet. As if they had heard him, the voices eventually fall silent and the boy drifts away to dreams.
In the morning the boy walks down the hallway as gray light streams from the cloudy
skies. In the kitchen are his parents. His father sits at the table in shorts and a T-shirt reading a newspaper while his mother is up and cooking their breakfast. The boy notices his chest is still tight, it feels like he were being choked.
         "Good morning darling!" she says as he enters.
         The boy takes his seat at the table and looks down.
         "So we'll leave for the zoo around 10 o'clock but we'll have to pack some snacks and water before. Oh, I need to get my make-up done before too! I have this precious little lipstick Barbara lent me. She looked like such a darling with it on."
         The father says nothing in return and keeps his eyes focused on the paper. After a while, the idle chatter of his mother becomes background noise and the kitchen is otherwise in complete silence. And the boy had not lifted his eyes from the table before he realized that he was crying.