I started writing this story called 'Alex hears in colour' a while ago. It started out as a short story but got too long and now I'm kind of sitting on it and have been for a while. I do intend to go back to it - any feedback would be appreciated!
Here are some bits:
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Alex groaned. Reaching across his bed he took a second pillow and shoved it on top of his head trying to stifle the inescapable noise around him. Six blocks away someone was practicing a violin, and it was flat. At the top of his street a coffee machine whirred into life delivering a much needed morning jolt to Mr Bay at number four. Next-door Mrs Anderson crunched on some dry cereal. Alex wished she would use milk like everybody else. Inside the pillow covering Alex’s face dust mites did things that David Attenborough would put in a documentary.
For Alex if the world could be peeled like an onion it would come apart in rings of sound, keys and tones and thuds and screeches. Sounds no one else in the world could access. To him there were no small noises, a gentle tap was a roar, and a step was an avalanche.
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The day after his eighteenth birthday he lay in bed feeling sorry for himself. Staring at the small pile of gifts lumped in the corner of his bedroom he thought about the gift that he wished he never got. He wondered what silence sounded like. He wondered if it would be possible to drown out the persistent background noise of his life. He knew he was a freak and could not belong anywhere. He felt bad that his dedicated mother had given up her job to home-school him, and now he was amounting to nothing. He felt bad that his family wore slippers around the house to minimize the scuffling of their feet, but he secretly wished that the neighbours would do the same thing. Alex had fallen into a slump of self-pity, feeling like he was the only person in the world who could not fit in, so he stopped trying. As the months rolled on he moved into the granny flat at the back of his parents house. Special insulation was put into the walls and he slept by wearing ear plugs – although the ear plugs themselves made noises as the rubber rubbed against the hairs on the inside of his ear. He started to become overwhelmed with sadness and felt like he was Tom Hanks in Castaway, without even a football to be his friend. He grew more and more eccentric and lived in his granny flat passing time by making charts of sounds.
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It wasn’t often that Alex braved the city from his quiet suburban home. The interesting thing about Alex’s hearing that he was really only about to discover was that the noisy city centre was no less bearable than his more quiet suburb. The kind of noises that made other people jump, like a truck blaring its horn, just kind of blended in for Alex. He would hear those noises, but he would also hear them coming a mile away. He would hear the sharp intake of air of the driver as their annoyance at being cut off, he would hear the friction of their arm against their shirt as they abruptly pulled their arm back into position to strike the horn. By the time they honked, Alex had already processed the noise and moved on.
As Alex sat, sipping his latte and listening to the city he had an epiphany. He had spent his first twenty years of life running from noise. He realized in one very beautiful moment that all this time his approach had been wrong. Noise stimulated him, it separated him from everything. Alex saw and smelt through his ears. He had been wishing his ability away, hiding in a padded granny flat but a magnificent sensation was awaiting him. He took a deep breath in and closed his eyes. He stood up, eyes still closed. All around him people were rushing around, cars driving down the road. As Alex walked, he could hear where the ground surface was uneven because of the noise of the air pressure when the soul of someone’s foot hit the ground. He could hear when someone walked close to him, it was as if time and space stood still. He opened his eyes and confirmed his suspicions. He could hear where everything on the street was. He took a step forward and knew that he was walking onto the road. He stopped for a moment, he knew a car was driving towards him, after pausing he could hear the grind of the gears, it had gone into second gear, it was slowing down, he took a step out and walked quickly, it was actually easy, he knew where everything was on the entire street.
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