By Michael Degnan

I didn’t speak much in college. That is, not if I was in a group. I didn’t like speaking in front of a crowd, even just among friends.

For hours I could be with others, laughing and smiling, but saying little more than “I know” or “same.”

Of course, if I were just with one person, I could talk about anything for hours. Especially if we were smoking cigarettes or if I thought she was cute.

But on balance, I was quiet. I knew that silence was like quicksand — the longer you stayed in it, the harder it was to leave.

One of the stories I remembered most vividly from college was about a guy who didn’t say a word for a year. Then, with media cameras around him, he finally said: “Man, I could really go for a Pepsi.” A friend of mine had gone to high school with him when this happened. Apparently Pepsi paid him $1 million. 

I never found out if this story was true. I was skeptical at the time, but my friend was adamant, and this was just the type of story that I loved. I wanted it to be true.

I was reading the news when it came back to me. I had just scanned a list of headlines, all of them inane. “Feeling broke on a $665k salary” was the last one I saw before closing my computer. It was all so cynical — content only existed now for clicks and attention. None of it made me better informed. None of it made me feel good.

Maybe silence wasn’t a bad thing, I thought. Maybe silence was a virtue, a principled stand. And the guy I had heard about in college — a hero.

I decided not to talk for a day. And then another, and another. It was easier than expected. Work was just emails and WhatsApps, even with my boss, who was 10 years younger and ended every sentence with an exclamation point.

It didn’t take long for people to notice. The checkout guy at the corner store with a blank name tag, my drinking buddies who only felt like themselves in a dimly lit dive bar, the woman at the desk in my building’s lobby who always wore sweaters and looked like my aunt Kelly —  they all started to comment on it, asking when I was going to talk again, and laughing when I only shrugged in response.

By the second month, I stopped hearing from my friends. The novelty of grabbing drinks with a friend who didn’t talk had worn off.

I spent most of my free time reading. My dad had put me on to the classics. He wanted to know what I thought about Moby Dick. He was fascinated by how whales saw the world, each eye looking in a different direction. How amazing, he thought, that their brain can resolve two completely different fields of sight.

Sometimes he would end his texts with the line: If your mom were still here, she’d say she loves you. 

Time moved quickly. Each day, each week, held the same shape. Before I knew it, it had almost been a year. This, of course, was my target, my finish line. 

I reached it on a Tuesday in April. I sat in my reading chair with a cup of coffee and, for the first time in a year, made a call.

“Hello — is this a joke? Michael, is this you?” My dad talked fast, his words tumbling out.

“Hi Dad. Yeah, it’s me.” My voice was soft and tentative, like a weak muscle after a cast is finally taken off. “So, what’s new?” I said, not sure what it was that I actually wanted to say. My dad laughed and said not much, just that it was good to hear from me. Yeah, I agreed. And then I said more, not sure where it was coming from.

“Dad? Remember after Mom died how you used to make up stories before bed? About all the crazy things that she was doing — the reasons why I’d never see her again?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you do that again?”

There was a grunt that sounded like my dad smiling, and he started to tell me that the reason I hadn’t seen my mom recently wasn’t because she had died in a car crash, but because she had been recruited to lead the mission to Mars. Apparently the billionaire in charge had heard about how good she was with directions and how many constellations she knew.

My dad went on, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember what my mom’s voice sounded like. She had become lost in silence. Maybe that was what this was all about — after missing my mom for thirty years, I wanted to lose myself in silence too and search for her there.

As my dad described the red space rocks that my mom had to collect, I closed my eyes and smiled, wondering why it had taken me so long to start looking.

                                                        *          *        *

Michael Degnan lives on an island in Maine. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine and elsewhere.