purple plums

There was, occasionally, this matter of the Voice. Occasionally, because it wasn’t every day that she caught the V train home, and it wasn’t every day that the girl listened. But occasionally, through the fog of afternoon breath and the clatter of rat feet pattering along the subway rails, the Voice would appear.

The Voice was deep and solid, like a tree taken root in her eardrum. Often, when the voice rang out over the loudspeaker of the train, it sounded very masculine. However, on days when the rain fell at a particular angle and not even the children in strollers would smile, a feminine curve would attach itself to the ends of sentences. The girl liked to think that it was the Voice’s way of compensating for how terrible the world felt, but she didn’t want to assume.

The thing that made the voice the Voice was not the sound of it. That, she knew, would be easy enough to overlook a million rides in a row. What shook the girl out of her window reflection hypnosis, were the words. “Please take note of your limbs” the Voice would announce, smooth and confident, “don’t hold the doors of the subway open.” “Thank you for obeying all rules,” the voice would sing, “you will be arrested if you don’t.” “The next time you see a dog, whisper kind words in its ear” the voice would laugh, “and you’ll be happy forever.”

Strangely, comments like the latter never seemed to cause much of a stir. The men in suits and the women in heels didn’t bat an eyelash when the Voice told them to “make tables, not chairs” and they didn’t shake a hip when it told them to “dance until you forget how to walk.” At first, the girl was worried – she thought she was the only one who heard these things. Yet, perhaps the third or fourth time that the Voice bounced around the hurtling car, she caught a toothless man smiling and looking at his feet. The Voice had proclaimed that “there is no use in wearing socks if they don’t make you giggle,” and the girl noticed that there were stockings peeking out of the toothless man’s shoes that bore the face of Hillary Clinton. The girl smiled too.


There is, occasionally, this matter of the Voice.