Freeform Friday: La La La

La La La

by Belinda Roddie

When I cover my ears, I can only hear the echoes of my own words and mistakes, like steel drums rusting yet still screeching when they're struck.

I plug everything up, and while the trains are trapped in the tunnels, their wheels won't stop spinning. And their whistles won't stop shrieking. The locomotive, even while immobile, lives.

The only kind of music I'll apparently listen to are the ones created by my past demons. When the steel drums are finally too corroded to make a "satisfying" sound. So they'll run their claws across lyre strings and break them, one by one. They'll chew on oboe reeds. They'll blow "Hallelujahs" out of bent bugles and revel in the out-of-tune torture.

So I uncover my ears because I can't take the cacophony anymore. Only the noise outside is worse. It is full of breaking bottles, crunching bones. It consists of profanity and crying and end of relationship prophecies. Blood has both a smell and a sound. The trickle is as rusty as the drums in the my ears. La, la, la, love, loathe, lost, lonesome, la, la, la. The lyrics are incoherent after a while. But the plague-ridden chorus just keeps singing.

And it.

Won't.

Stop.