Gone Lawn 61 : Christine Faught

There was a girl born under silence, not because she lacked voice, but because no one listened. Her thoughts were bright things, darting like minnows beneath still water, but the surface never broke. She left drawings on the fridge—tiny testaments of self. They curled and yellowed. She brought wildflowers in from the yard and placed them in a cup on the table. No one noticed when the petals dried and fell.

On an evening when the air felt thick with silent absence, a creature came to her—shaggy as dusk, crowned with antlers like a forest myth. It had no voice either, only breath and eyes and the weight of knowing.

They made a pact: no words. She offered her voice as tribute while the creature stayed close. It slept curled against her ribs and watched her dreams like a guardian at the edge of the in-between. She taught it the language of gesture, of stillness, of reverence. In return, it taught her to connect in silence, in the spaces between breaths.

In the eighth winter, the creature faded. It didn’t whimper or strain—just curled a little tighter one night and didn’t rise. The girl laid her hand on its ribs and felt stillness, deep and hollow. She closed her eyes and let the silence settle between them like snow.

She finished her sleep on the floor next to the still-warm body. The creature had always preferred the hush of baseboards and rugs, so she made the floor holy. It felt right, a sanctuary of humility.

The shadowy fog that passed for family said the right things. They placed the remains in a small tin, smooth and silver, and set it on the phone stand in the hallway. We’ll have a proper ceremony, they said. We’ll bury this together. But days passed. Then weeks. The tin stayed untouched, nestled among unpaid bills and old batteries. The phone never rang.

One afternoon, a visitor entered the house and looked at the tin. She laughed, and opened the lid. She poked at the ash with a curious finger, as if it were sand or sugar, as if no soul had ever warmed it. The girl trembled in the doorway, quietly enraged. There was no language for what had been broken.

That night, the sky wept and so did she, though not aloud. Rain slicked the windows, soft and constant. The girl slipped past the rooms where light had never reached her, took the tin in both hands, and stepped out into the dark.

She walked without shoes, but did not feel the sting of the cold ground. She took the tin behind the house, to a spot of soft earth near the garden where summer strawberries would grow. She knelt and began to dig into the wet earth with her fingers. Mud swallowed her wrists and clung to her sleeves.

She gently set the tin of ash into the deep hollow she’d made, careful as prayer. No words were spoken. None were needed. The creature had never asked for a eulogy — only for loyalty. She had no priest, no prayers, no watchers. Only mud and memory. It was enough.

She buried the promise and the part of herself that had once believed someone else might carry the silence and guard her inner flame. Rain soaked her hair as she wept over the grave, the earth receiving more sorrow than the house ever had. She pressed her face into the wet soil—into the final bed of her guardian, antlered like myth, shaped like a hound—tasting dirt and salt until her grief became part of the ground.

She grew older. The silence did not leave her; it grew sinew and form. She learned how to shape it. She mastered the craft of drawing sound from stillness the way others draw water from a well.

Her skill became known, and she was summoned to a high chamber. It was carved for resonance, dressed in velvet and gold, a place where the world claimed to listen. The walls were tall enough to hold a lifetime of echoes. The doorway opened only for those who had mastered a certain kind of voice.

What she offered there was not performance. It was invocation. Not a plea to be heard, but a reckoning. Each note rang with soil and shadow, the quiet weight of a creature who had once breathed beside her. She did not call its name. She didn’t need to. It was already in the room.

While the chamber swirled with golden threads of sound, she watched the untouched chairs near the front—the ones she’d asked the smoky fog-figures of her childhood to fill. In her mind, dark tendrils still reached toward her, but her heart spun shimmering tapestries in the spaces between her breaths, and her hands did not falter. The room listened, not because she asked it to, but because silence had shaped her into someone who could not be ignored.

Christine Faught is a violinist, mom to queer kids, and writer in the Pacific Northwest. Her work blends lyrical prose, mythic resonance, and emotional realism. She is currently building a collection of short fiction.