Silent Storm

Ciara hurled her plate across the kitchen, screaming at the top of her lungs into the suffocating silence. Panting, she pounded her fists on the counter and glared at the splotches of spaghetti sauce covering her bookcase full of useless music books and medical texts. She beat the scarred surface until her knuckles split, careless of her pianist's fingers — what good were they to her now?

They had to be wrong, there had to be a way to fix it. Music was her life! Damn the doctors, their helpful suggestions, and their completely unhelpful medicine. "Idiopathic sudden hearing loss" was a description, not a diagnosis, but not one of the dozen she'd begged for help could tell her anything more useful! If one more person told her how brilliant Beethoven was even after he lost his hearing, there would be murder, and she wouldn't be sorry. Beethoven was a genius, one of a kind — were you supposed to just accept that life sucked and go on with it if you didn't have that luck? No way in hell!

Drained and exhausted, she walked to the sink and washed the blood from her hands, then started cleaning up her splattered dinner. The incoming call light on the TTY unit attached to her phone started blinking, but she certainly didn't feel like being social. Anything, anywhere away from the human race was what she wanted now.

She walked away from it to stare out the rain washed window by the baby grand piano that took up most of her living room. She hardly saw the wind lashed trees illuminated by the streetlights as she brooded with one hand resting absently on the neglected instrument, brushing the dust from it.

She could still play, she knew. She had been just starting to make a living as a concert pianist, and she knew just how good she was, but she knew just how much she had lost when she couldn't hear herself anymore. She couldn't do that. She had tried, once, at the advice of a well-intentioned therapist who the third specialist had referred her to. She had sat at the bench with her bare feet against the hardwood floor to better sense the vibrations, and had played all of three bars before crashing her hands violently against the keys and running out of the apartment.

She had thrown a blanket over it when she came back, and hadn't touched it since.

Lightning strobed and flickered, and suddenly Ciara couldn't stand it. She had to get out, or she was going to break something much more precious than a plate.

She grabbed her jacket and fled, slamming the door behind her with a silent and unsatisfying crash.

The driving rain was almost warm, but the wind seemed much stronger than it had looked from her sheltered living room. She pushed against it for the sheer angry joy of something to fight, not bothering about what direction she was going. She stumbled down the sidewalk, head down and shoulders hunched as she beat her way across the street and found herself heading into one of the pocket sized parks that were tucked into odd corners of the city. The biggest oak she had ever seen was the centerpiece of the small space, regally shading a couple of benches and a small pond — beautiful, even in the little light thrown by the park lamp posts, but certainly nowhere to go in a thunderstorm!

Deciding for sanity and sense, Ciara stopped at the edge of the park and stared at the king tree. Was someone standing by it? She pushed her drenched hair from her face and peered into the shadows.

Someone was, she was almost certain. A flash of moving white convinced her. That was insane! She took a deep breath, then let it out. Even if she yelled, she was pretty sure the wind was going to drown her out, and she was self-conscious about how her speech might sound to a stranger. Everyone told her she sounded fine, but how could she know?

A sudden flash of lightning lit the tree, followed hard by a crack of thunder strong enough to rattle her bones. She blamed her sudden shiver on that and the gusting wind, since she couldn't possibly have seen what she thought she saw under the spreading branches.

Ciara had never been strong on her Irish heritage, but her grandfather had been a great storyteller. His chilling tales of the ancient woman in winding rags who marked you for imminent death once you'd heard her wail had made a lasting impression. They were stories, though, simply stories spun to frighten children and make them mind. There was no banshee, and certainly not one - the lightning strobed again and she fled without intent from the crone who crouched below the tree, head thrown back and mouth stretched wide in a silent rictus.

Again a brilliant flash, and the grinding thunder that came with it shook her no more than the shaking of the ground when the king oak was split and shattered by the spear of lightning, falling across the sidewalk where she had stood moments before.

Stunned, she whirled and stared at the fallen giant. She looked back towards the smoking ground where it had grown for so long, but she couldn't tell if she saw a wisp of white or not.

Biting her lip, she pulled her jacket tight against the storm and turned towards home.

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