On Tuesday she found a music box and promptly hid it from her mother.

At night, when the lights went out and her ear muffs removed, she would press the tiny box to her cheek. She would twist the metal crank that was shaped like a butterfly’s wing and listen to the gears turn inside. The tin slats hit the ridges of a metal wheel with slow precise movements, beating out a song the girl soon memorized.

When she first heard its song, she cried. Cried because she’d never heard anything like it before, never knew sounds could tell stories or make her mind and body feel.

Her world had no music, only noise. There were whirring fans that fought back the heat, saliva trapped between a dog’s cheeks as it licked the salt from her toes, or the crash of thunder, the burst of a bullet from a gun, the sigh of a man breathing his last breath.

Everyone in her life wore thick leather muffs and black straps across their mouths. When they were crossing through the districts her mother even made them wear helmets and used silver tape to mask her mouth shut.

She was fluent with her hands—she loved to speak up in lessons, to chat with her mother, and to play games with her friends. When they crossed, her mother signed to her stories, terrors of what would happen if they took the muffs off. The world was crumbling. The mountains were shattering, the impact of the stars hitting the other side of the earth would damage her eardrums beyond repair. That was why her mother slapped her if she used voice speak. Why her mother burned her fingertips if she responded to any auditory stimulus. They were evolving and her mother was only trying to protect her along the process.

At night, in her soundproof room, she disobediently strained her ears. She wanted to hear the world collapsing. A soft, static sound interrupted by the rush of air or rain. She wanted to hear more. She was hungry for sounds.

It was the third week after finding the music box that she tested her voice. A trembling, wavering tone, that almost hurt to produce. At first, she hummed, and then she sang along with the box. Vowels wide and unpracticed, they wavered along with the tinny melody.

Two months after finding the box, she had placed sounds to things she knew.

For the dogs, she hissed through her cheeks. Spittle flew from her mouth to replicate their wet panting.

For the rocks, she clicked and rolled her tongue behind her teeth. She liked to imagine the rocks sounding this way beneath her feet, revolving and skittering across the asphalt as she crossed the districts.

For her mother, she made a low groan, one that could be angry and impatient and proud. It rumbled in her chest, and she like to rest a hand over her throat to feel the vibrations.

She had crafted her own language of song and sound. She stopped sleeping at night and grew anxious for bedtime. The time when she was alone with her sounds. Twist, twist, twist; sing, hum, dance. She lived for the music box.

One night, she said goodnight to her mother, a hand pressed against her mother’s cheek, another signaling to the door. She couldn’t help but notice how thin her mother's skin felt, like tissue paper, creased and breaking. Her mother smiled and bit her nose softly before releasing her. The girl tried to walk, calmly, to her bedroom, closing the door with care behind her. She reached a hand under her pillow and pulled out her treasure. She twisted its handle and heard a strange crinkling sound as the coil inside the music box broke.

H. M. L. Swann is an American writer and teacher. She has taught English in the U.S.A., Mongolia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Her fiction can be found in The Manchester Anthology IX and on her blog at hmlswann.com. She graduated in December 2021 with a master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester.