In the quiet, you will hear us, our voices rising above the hush.
How do you tell the difference between thinking and hearing? It used to come so naturally. Clarence had lived alone for some time. It should have been easy.
One weekend he tried counting all the people on his picture wall he knew were dead. Some deaths he knew because he’d seen a notice or received a phone call, others because they’d already been old when he was young. His children and grandchildren were alive, although he rarely saw them. They spent their time with his ex-wife, who he assumed was alive. No one had informed him otherwise. Few photos of her adorned his wall. Just the family portraits, where he and Paula bracketed their handsome brood. He believed the divorce had been his fault, although he was fuzzy on the details.
Sometimes a photograph exposes our true nature. Paula looked lovely and kind in hers. He yearned to find such kindness again.
His face in photographs was always difficult to read.
Did you hear what we said? Do you even care?
Some whispers might have been hers. Things she said while he wasn’t listening, come back now as memory. She’d had such a soft voice, although he hadn’t heard it in years. He couldn’t remember it exactly, so maybe one of these voices could be hers. He’d read that whispers don’t require vocal cords. But didn’t they require breath?
Sometimes the moments captured in these pictures—an angry look, a raised hand—he’d prefer to forget. Occasionally he spotted other faces within the frames, reflections in the glass. Someone behind him? Their images were too dim to identify. Perhaps that was where they lived.
If Clarence had it all to do over, he might have decorated like a minimalist, uncluttered spaces with clean lines and useful, functional furniture. He would have followed the advice to use small rugs instead of carpeting, gotten rid of the flower-patterned upholstery, and paid attention when the magazines said more than two pictures in a room screamed Grandmother’s House.
Well, he was a grandfather, and he wasn’t embarrassed by it. He didn’t always remember how old his grandchildren were, but he still loved them. Perhaps he was even a great-grandfather by now. He couldn’t quite remember.
He did not own a nice house. He couldn’t afford one. When Paula divorced him decades ago, they sold the big home where they raised their kids. She took her share and moved to California. He took a few furniture pieces no one else wanted, and these photographs. This one-bedroom bungalow had been constructed in the late Twenties, one of several such houses built at the same time on Alphabet Row. His was the smallest on the street which made him wonder if they ran out of bricks. A large wooden W once decorated the red front door. All that remained was its dead gray silhouette.
The house wasn’t big enough for a couple with a child, so families might have been started here, but they never stayed long. The turnover in occupants must have been high. He imagined there had been other single people like himself, widows and unattached men, old folks holed up for their final days.
Perhaps these were the voices he heard. They’d left something of themselves behind. Were they talking about him? Sometimes he assumed his brain wasn’t working properly, or this house wasn’t working properly, maybe both and the same.
The dining and living rooms shared a continuous wall which he’d turned into a gallery. The pictures started just above the wainscoting and continued until four or five inches below the ceiling. Photos of his children at various ages, family group photos, friends both distant and close, memorialized milestones and accomplishments, dead relatives, including several he never knew or could not identify. His memory wasn’t what it used to be.
Your grandfather’s cousin Emma. You never met her.
The voice hadn’t been his. Clarence’s hearing had become unreliable the last few years, but sometimes he heard things he couldn’t know.
Choosing which pictures to hang on a wall is a serious concern. You’re advocating that these people and events are worth remembering. It seemed a kind of idolatry. It shouldn’t have surprised him, having elevated them this way, that some would feel compelled to talk back.
A warm summer day. I was in love then. I hadn’t yet lost the ability.
Clarence spent hours studying these pictures. He’d lost so many names, and confused others. He hoped looking at these faces day after day might bring those names back to him.
What troubled him most were the things he couldn’t see, hiding in the unfocused shadows of the backgrounds. He wondered if there were similar things to be worried about in the shadows of his own house. It was a small house, but there were many shadows.
Either your son or your grandson. They both looked the same at that age, as did you.
During the day, the picture frames were like windows into other times and other lives. Some—his children, grandchildren—he knew very well. Others were only vaguely recalled strangers. The number who were strangers increased with each passing month.
He dusted as often as he could, but he couldn’t keep up. Cobwebs and spiderwebs formed, flies were caught, and flies devoured.
It’s filthy on top of these frames. Don’t you ever clean?
Some months he waged all-out war on the dust. He always lost. It didn’t matter whether clarity or confusion reigned, the dust accumulated. Dust always wins.
Such disrespect. You say you care, but where is the evidence?
At night he kept the lights dim to save on electricity. He couldn’t see the frames and the picture wall bubbled with shadow. Yet the photos never slept. He heard subtle movements within the frames, shifts and tilts as imbalances were created. He’d never felt secure in how they hung. He’d never bought expensive frames. In the dark the whispers were indecipherable. They sounded more like the inarticulate complaints of the dying. He had never been a religious man, but he resorted to mumbling prayers in the dark. He didn’t know what else to do.
The whispering continued in the mornings, and occurred throughout the afternoons, a low volume sibilance with occasional breathy vowels, floating through all the rooms. The best reception, if he could call it that, was when he was standing by the picture wall, but the voices were evident in other rooms as well.
One afternoon he noticed a photograph on the wall he hadn’t seen before. It was him, or someone who looked like him, waltzing with a young woman, but he didn’t recognize her. She might have been a younger version of Paula, but if that was him in the picture the ages didn’t match. The young woman might have been their daughter, but he couldn’t remember ever dancing with his daughter, which was a shame.
Perhaps the arrangement of the photos was too random. If he reordered them chronologically, they might make more sense. But Clarence’s memory wasn’t up to the task. He couldn’t reliably remember what day it was today. In his life every day was the same.
There he was in a shiny green jacket and a gray newsboy cap. A misguided attempt to look dapper. Yet he couldn’t remember ever having such items in his wardrobe.
You’ve never looked worse than now.
In a more familiar photo, he sported a full black beard with long, ragged hair. He looked like a werewolf. Beside it, a more welcoming photo of one of the children blowing bubbles. He couldn’t tell which of their children it was. They all looked the same at that age. Or maybe it was someone else’s child altogether. Perhaps a neighbor’s.
If you don’t remember who will?
Weeks went by when the only human beings he encountered were the ones in these pictures. His other frequent companions were spiders and flies and the occasional roach. Once a wren landed on his windowsill. Clarence wept when it flew away.
He could hear them talking even when he was in the cellar. Their voices seeped through the walls. Perhaps some were buried nearby, and he was the only one available to listen.
What did you forget now?
His cell phone for one. It was for the best. No one ever called with pleasant news. Usually they were salespeople, or thieves eager to take his money. He hated the sound of their tiny, distant voices, like buzzing wasps, begging.
Now and then he heard his lost phone breathing, but that sound could have come from anywhere.
Clarence had met few of his neighbors. He never intended to be a hermit, but he supposed that had become a reasonable interpretation of his behavior. A terrible man lived next door. Clarence could hear him screaming at night. He wondered if that man’s walls whispered as well.
Gazing at his grandfather’s photo one afternoon he was surprised to discover the old man had shaved. A few weeks later he’d grown it back again. As Clarence recalled, his grandfather only married once, but there were different women with him in the photo every time he looked.
One morning Clarence woke up with a headache affecting his vision. The glare off the pictures was painful to look at. Then he realized the frames were all missing their photos. The wall appeared riddled with rectangular holes.
When he next looked, only the photographs of him had returned. In each one his face was grim and waxen, his eyes closed. They looked like those Victorian post-mortem photographs taken as a memento for the family.
The body decays, but an image lasts forever.
Clarence’s driver’s license was taken away a year ago. It was for the best. He’d become problematic as a driver. Distraction was his normal state. He didn’t miss it. There was nowhere he needed to be. Sometimes he forgot his phone number, but he never called himself anyway. He did have a problem choosing clothing. He left his house so seldomly he was never quite sure what to wear. One weekend he went out to shovel the snow from his sidewalk and found it unbearably cold. Then he realized he was only wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and slippers.
It is cold outside, but colder in here.
On sunny afternoons, the glass in the picture frames bloomed into a complex pattern of reflections. Often images moved from one frame to another. He couldn’t be sure—he didn’t have time to take an inventory of every photo—but things had gone missing, items, people, or both, reappearing somewhere else.
He started drinking alcohol at meals and between meals. He’d never been a big drinker, but now drinking seemed a useful way to fill the time. He saw nothing wrong with this, but he’d be humiliated if any of his children or grandchildren found him in such a state. More than once he was eating at the table when he discovered none of the pictures on the wall were familiar to him.
He often woke up in the middle of the night, climbed out of bed, and went to the picture wall to see if anything had changed. A beach scene with children—he believed they were his cousins. He was supposed to be in the photo, but he couldn’t pick himself out. The water in the photo moved. Had one of the children drowned?
He found a portrait of himself he’d never seen before. He was lying on the floor, embracing a bottle of whiskey as if it were a small child. It was the worst likeness of himself he’d ever seen. He removed it from the wall, tore the photo out of its frame, wadded it up, and threw it in the trash.
We’re always here if you need to talk.
It was a tiny house, but now and then he became completely lost in it. More than once he was convinced he was in some wayward room of their old, much larger home. Paula was calling for him, growing increasing impatient, but he couldn’t find a—something— which would lead him to her. He’d lost the right word, but it didn’t matter. If he only tried the right bottle, he would find her. Yes, bottle was the word he wanted.
A bottle was what you always wanted.
The seasons changed in these photos from one day to the next. He’d see the same outdoor snapshot in summer, winter, and fall. Trees died and had to be cut down. Houses were bulldozed and the wreckage scraped down to bare earth.
You cannot argue with progress. Or stop it.
Photos rearranged themselves. Photos went completely missing, but then reappeared again weeks later. None of the people in his pictures ever offered an explanation, even after he’d questioned them for hours.
He watched as one pale, thin woman traveled from frame to frame across the wall. He believed it was his great grandmother. Legend had it she’d gone walking across the fields one day and never returned. The vegetation in these photos withered, followed by the people themselves.
Despite his best attempts to save them, the people in these pictures kept dying. Wisps of dust gathered on their shoulders and in their hair.
How can you see us through all this dust?
The man in the photo in front of him moved closer to the glass. Now he looked walleyed and distorted. The surface of the glass was wet. Clarence realized the photo was an underwater scene, and the man inside was drowning.
Do something!
Clarence did something. He took a nap. While he was sleeping the wind blew through the house knocking pictures off the walls. One frame sprouted wings and flew out the window. At the end of the storm the house was a wreck.
Whenever. Whatever. Life is chaos.
He woke up, went into the dining room, and stared at the picture wall. Everything looked fine. Everything seemed as it should be. The house itself smelled of polish and freshly cut flowers. A pie was baking in the oven. But he had a challenging time finding any photos in which he was included. They were all of Paula and the kids, Paula with the kids and Paula solo, along with the usual assortment of relatives, friends, and strangers.
When Clarence finally found himself, he was disappointed by the quality of the photograph. A tiny candid snapshot near one end of the wall, one of the last to be hung. He is turning away from the camera. He doesn’t want his picture taken. His features are a blur.
When he turns back he is looking out of the frame into the dim space beyond. It is difficult to see through the dusty glass. But there is Paula with a worried expression looking in.
Clarence?
Originally published in Supernatural Tales 51, Winter 2022-23.
