John Biscello

(Excerpt from Worlds Last Imagined)

I became useful. I didn’t plan on it but it happened. I began collecting screams. I had collected many silences and because the city was a quiet rainy city, its people quiet and sepulchral, the silences got me dreaming and thinking about the nature of screams, their place in this and all worlds. There must be times people want to scream. Screams need air like anything else.

I put on a shawl so people could see me better and set up a booth in the marketplace. I lined a table with glass jars and put up a sign that read Scream Here. Some people thought I was selling screams and wanted to find out more. I explained that I wasn’t selling screams, I was offering free opportunities for people to scream into jars. Many people were frightened or paranoid or whatever by the idea of screaming publicly into a jar. Even though I had set up a curtain which they could hide behind when screaming. It didn’t matter. No takers.

Not until the day an old woman, bent like a fishhook, boldly took a jar, disappeared behind the curtain, stepped out from behind the curtain, handing me the jar, and left without saying a word.

Needing to satisfy my curiosity, I went behind the curtain, unscrewed the lid from the jar, suctioned my ear to the hole, and was blown back by a gust of freezing wind, my ear instantly frostbitten by the old woman’s history coiled within a single scream.

It wasn’t long before people were lining up to scream their screams into jars. Some would step out from behind the curtain, weeping or on the verge of weeping. Others would come out looking stunned, a glazed glassy look owning their eyes. There were all kinds of looks, all kinds of reactions. I felt glad for having introduced this pastime. I became known as The Girl Who Collects Screams, which is funny because I always thought of myself as The Girl Who Collects Silences. Of course, no one except Yuki talked about my collected silences. I understood that the quality and value of silences diminished when talked about. Silences were not meant to be shared.

I noticed an intriguing range of phenomena when studying and spending quality time with screams. Some screams died inside jars, while others multiplied and morphed. Some screams gave off extreme heat and moisture, others projected dry freezing temperatures. The climates shifted dramatically from scream to scream. Some screams were architecturally layered, what I mean is I would hear voices behind voices behind voices, layered tiers of sound constructing pyramids of scream. This phenomenon demanded greater intimacy from me, deeper listening. This is how I discovered that all screams, not just some, were choral in nature and history. There was no such thing as single scream, or a scream born of or containing within its volume a single voice. Single-sourced screams were only single-sourced-seemingly, but in reality (my intimacy grew deeper and truer), in reality they were composite accumulations of many screams from multiple sources and origins. Isolated screams didn’t exist. Screams were chamber pieces in a troubled continuum.

This slanted my dreaming and thinking along a different track: The screams collected in the jars represented many. A solo scream held within it immeasurable chorus. You may choose to scream into a jar, that is your choice as an individual, but the molecular complexion of the scream was always beyond you, beyond the I-screaming, the you-screaming. This meant people, through emissions of sound, could play the role of liberators: I scream, therefore we are. Or, we scream therefore I am.