Hannah Zamora (she/her) is a writer and creative who is still figuring it all out. Originally from an area west of Onguiaahra, also known as the Niagara Region in Ontario, she now lives, works, and creates in Kjipuktuk (otherwise known as Halifax, Nova Scotia). She holds an MA in English literature from Western University and a BA in English and Great Books (an admittedly slippery title) from St. Thomas University. The through-lines of her career have emerged in arts administration, marketing, event planning, and publicity—but she’d rather be weaving or gardening. Right now, she’s probably playing with her dog, Jojo. (Either that, or she’s daydreaming about playing with Jojo.)
“‘Silence Thing’ responds to a bonsai tree I was mesmerized by at the Montreal Botanical Garden. The 275-year-old Juniperus chinensis var. Sargentii in the Japanese collection, donated by Kenichi Oguchi, is a living tree that seems to be wrapped around a dead one. I don’t know if the dead wood is an old part of the tree or some other being it has entwined itself around and absorbed into its own structure. Though the tree lives (and has lived for almost three centuries), it is locked with death at every moment—as are the characters in ‘Silence Thing’ as they face down a horrifying grief. Bonsai also require constant attention, something that the speaker grapples with amid the all-consuming details of the slow days before death and the neglect of the domestic space that has turned into one big sick room. Is the dead wood of the tree a product of similar neglect? At some point in its life, was it left in the corner of an overgrown garden for who-knows-how-long? The speaker and their partner decide, like the bonsai and its curators, to rot and then continue. The horror of grief and the threat of a relationship’s dissolution is ultimately faced with an embrace.”
We sit in silence again around the table with cardboard under one of its legs. Your father won’t let you lift his food to his mouth, though you see him naked when you help him dress. We eat a reheated supper, scraping clean the thin plates that are probably coated with unknowable lead paint. I try not to dwell on it.
In my family home, a silence like this could never survive. It would have starved on the crumbs we rarely leave between words. We lick the spoons clean with conversation, ponderings, snatches of song, well-worn lines from movies, questions shouted across the house, and observations of the dogs as they play or sleep or watch the windows. You were taken aback. You barely spoke when you first visited and they thought you didn’t like them. Now you sing along to half-remembered pizza commercials and you throw a joke into the mix, catching the scraps before they hit the floor for silence to devour.
Our wordless meal feels as if we are shifting our shoulders, clutching our arms tight to our sides, and making space in a tiny room for something to enter. This thing… it tempts us to fill the space, to at last look your stooping father in the eye and say you’re dying you’re dying you’re dying as the fridge rattles impossibly loud. It’s worse when the rattle stops. It’s worse when we’re exposed and all the not-talking lays a feast for the monstrous, mouthless thing coiling beneath the table. This is what we have invited with our cavernous quiet—an absorbing, mulching muscle of a body at our feet.
My phone is on my knee. I could scroll. If I was alone and it was this quiet I would scroll. I pray for a text, an email, a news alert about a celebrity’s falling star so I can look at something. Wouldn’t it be lovely to think about anything outside of this room?
Your father gets up with urgency, heading for the bathroom. You follow. And I cannot follow you. There’s a hierarchy to who can deal with the various indignities we’ve witnessed. You are the reluctant but kindhearted prince. I, the peasant maid pining for you and washing the dishes and laying the pullout couch with fresh flannel sheets. We will not sleep in your childhood bed.
I’ve never known how to move through this house. Nor did I think such a small space could be too big to handle. I think of my mom’s endless pointing at realtor signs as we drive and my dad saying “It’s a castle; a lot of upkeep.” Surely a house of this size would be safe—manageable. If only there were enough hours in the day to coax a man from the edge of death and dust the coffee table.
The aching springs of the pullout couch pop and echo beneath you. Down the hall, I swish hard water in my mouth and spit out the taste of metal with my toothpaste. Maybe I’ll never feel clean again. Maybe I’ll wring dust out of my socks like water. Maybe I’ll burn my clothes when we get home across provincial lines. I join you on our bed, such as it is, and I peel off my socks before tucking my feet under the blankets that smell like closet.
Laying on my side, the springs dig into my shoulder. But I have to look at you. So still on your back, I think of a medieval tomb effigy. Your placid face, finally at rest, somehow manages to be hard as stone and soft as erosion. Is there rot beneath the lid? Are you dying too? I can’t imagine it, seeing this place as you must and knowing that it decays as we breathe. Your eyes are closed but I know you aren’t sleeping. Perhaps your eyelids will open and there will be tears. Or there will just be eyes. And within you, the blackened hollow in a deceptive potato.
The silence thing on the floor in the kitchen is gnawing on the cardboard beneath the table leg, subdued for now, keeping its distance from your father’s laboured snores and the fridge’s steady growls.
I lay my arm across your chest, stroking the ball of your shoulder. Your hand moves up to my forearm and does not rest, but grips.
“I love you,” I whisper.
I press my lips to your collarbone. The rumble from the kitchen cuts out, the fridge spent for now, and I know the thing is stretching its segmented body, searching for gaps to fill. It moves, nosing its blind way across the stained linoleum to the living room. Despite our closeness, there is space for the silence thing to settle, seeping slime into the thin mattress to rust the frame that holds us.
Your hand is still gripping, keeping me still. But the thing must be on the carpet now, and if we don’t make a noise, who knows how far it will crawl. I kiss you again, mouth on the cotton of your t-shirt, as if I can suck the rot from your centre before it truly turns. Your lips part—a soft unsealing and a puff of breath. I hope our toes are safe from the creeping quiet and the hungry wyrm.
“I love you too.”
