She had been deaf for about fifteen minutes when she noticed. She had always preferred a quiet room; no air conditioner, no stereo, no humidifier, just a bed, a chest of drawers, and a small mirror standing upright on the night-stand. Every morning, she used the mirror to make sure her hair was arranged properly; it was shorter on her left side than the right, reaching only to her cheek. The right side went past her shoulders, and every morning it took her a few minutes to make sure none of the long strands were on the left side of her face. This was not a problem; it calmed her. She was a calm person.

Thus, when she dropped the mirror on the floor, and it shattered into a garden of fragments on the hardwood of her floor, she remained calm, and went to get a broom and dustpan. It was not until she had, delicately, brushed each piece of her reflection into the dustpan and thrown them away that she noticed that she had not heard the mirror shatter, or the frame hit the floor; she had, in fact, heard nothing for the past twenty minutes. She snapped her fingers in the air a few times, looking at her hand with her head tilted to one side. She heard no sound.

She paused for a moment before she tried to speak, closing her eyes. Her body became just a bit more tense than it had been before, and her grip on the dustpan became stronger. Then, feeling a slight tremor in her throat, she spoke. It made no sound. She spoke again, jutting her neck forward slightly and opening her mouth more. Still she heard nothing. She dropped the dustpan as her hand flew to her throat, pulling slightly as she tried to make a sound that she could hear. She stomped on the floor a couple of times, and watched the night-stand rattle, but she still heard nothing.

For a moment she sat back down on the bed, clutching her ears with both of her hands. Then, letting her breathing slow, she closed her eyes and rested her hands palms down on her bed. Her hands tightened around the blankets for a while, but then loosened gradually, the rising and falling of her chest the only motion in the room. After a moment, she opened her eyes, and took a deep breath. Looking around the room, she walked over to her closet and opened the door, pulling out an old woolen overcoat.

The coat was black, though it had faded slightly around the shoulders, and reached to her knees. The sleeves were a bit long for her, and loose, as her arms were thin; but the coat had seen a great deal of wear, and it kept her warm. She put it on, shrugging her shoulders a few times to fix the bunches in the fabric on her upper back, and reached into the right pocket. Pulling out a cell phone, she started dialing as if by habit, then stopped; she stared at the phone, then closed her eyes, then stared down briefly again. With an inaudible laugh that felt soft on her lips, she tossed the phone onto her bed, still unmade, and walked out of the room, taking the dustpan and brush with her.

Leaving them in the kitchen, she passed to her front door, and through it, locking it behind her and checking the lock twice.

The first time a car had driven past her, she had felt it rather than heard it, and jumped into the grass beside her, trembling; she looked up, breathing heavily, as more cars passed, staring blankly up from her prone position. But as she lay there, hearing nothing, she got used to the idea of cars passing; she started to be able to feel the difference in the wind against her face, and after a few moments of standing by the road, watching cars move and learning the feeling of a car moving, she had started walking forward again. Now she was looking at the drivers before they noticed her, turning her head with a slight toss to her hair, a few of the longer strands ending up on the left, blowing gently into her face each time a car passed or the wind flowed over her.

A few cars would slow down, a driver tilting his or her head slightly, glancing at her before turning back to the road, craning their necks slightly as if trying to form a fuller picture of her in their minds, before they were carried away. She made eye contact with some of these -- they slowed down just a bit more, sometimes taking a second glance, as their headlights passed her and she was once again clouded in relative darkness.

Each time a car passed her in this way, she smiled, watching the taillights fade.

Occasionally the wind would also brush past her in the same way, and she smiled then also, and looked toward it, although there was no one there. Just fields, on either side of her; fields of grass, blowing in the wind also, wilder than a lawn but tamer than a forest. A car passed her every minute or so, despite its being late; this was the only road which connected a number of places to the city. In the distance, as she continued walking, there was a faint light -- not the light of the moon, which was at her back, and not the light of the stars, which cast itself as a faint web around everything, including the few trees at the side of the road which stood still, watching her. It was the light of the city, and she was headed towards it.

As the dull glow of the city drew closer, her pace quickened somewhat. Buildings -- houses, closed shops and abandoned husks of barns or sheds -- started to appear to her sides, but there were no other people about, just the occasional face and set of eyes from inside a car. The headlights coming toward her were not the eyes of the car; making eye contact with them did nothing. When she looked at eyes inside a car, the car reacted, slowing slightly, the eyes following her as she disappeared back into darkness.

Then, after walking for an hour, and after no clear boundary, she was in the city. She pushed her hair back, briefly trying to push the longer strands to the right, and put her hands in her coat pockets, making small fists as the buildings around her stopped letting the wind through. She looked up -- the sky was still there.

And the city was, for her, peacefully silent.

The city, though it was late, was still filled with people, their mouths moving out of sync with their feet. Their feet did one of two things: either they stood still, occasionally kicking at dust or shuffling slightly out out of the way of another pair, or they strode, full of implied purpose and a shallow urgency, in a slightly mismatched beat which she only perceived by eye. Her own feet were steady, rhythmic and calm; she wore a soft smile as she sifted her way through the crowd, the people walking past glancing at her once, maybe, twice, eyes glancing head to toe, back up halfway, and then back forward. She followed eyes with her own, and they mostly sank down immediately, staring at their own feet. Every once in a while a pair of eyes would catch hers, and the two would hold for a second -- everything else moving slightly slower, the sharpness of the glance cutting through her silence and making the rest of the world blur briefly. And after each glance, it was gone.

Reaching an intersection in the streets, she stopped briefly at a corner, looking at the roads. There were very few cars, and they seemed to drift through meaninglessly; the people pushed past them and around them, sometimes even seeping out of them like ice melting. A slight breeze from down the street wafted her hair in front of her face, and as it passed, she blew the hair back, feeling the air leave her mouth and merge with the cool around her. She reached a hand up to grab at her breath, but there was nothing there; a dirty man on the other corner waved back, watching her curiously, shifting his position under a torn green blanket. She made eye contact with him, but his eyes were dull, no glint to them, only an unmoving presence. She closed her eyes briefly, and kept walking forward, feeling the asphalt give ever so slightly against her shoes, and feeling the air part as she walked.

Opening her eyes again, she found that she was passing into a darker part of the city, one where not all of the street lights were lit. There were still a fair number of people about, but they were less well dressed, and moving slower; still not like her. Their slowness was less calculated, and less intentional; it was as if they were the first group of people, only walking through tepid water instead of air. This part of the city, while it smelled like many things -- scarce few of them pleasant -- was most like tepid water, not actively unpleasant but somehow undesirable. When the mouths of the people moved, it was for short amounts of time, and they rarely settled into smiles afterwards. She shied away slightly from those moving past her, and they turned around, to leer over their shoulders; she pulled her overcoat close to herself and walked just a bit more briskly, just a bit less beautifully, forward.

She did not shy away, the most, from those who did not smile. In this part of the city, it was the smiles from which she stepped away, the grins with the slight curve at the tip of the lip which made her hands clutch at the fabric inside her pockets. The men and women who wore these smiles did not have eyes to match; they were tired, leaning on walls or walking alone, and though their voices were as silent to her as those of the people before, their eyes were unnerving, tracing not her eyes but the curves of her body as she continued to walk, biting her lip slightly each time one gestured toward her and pursed their lips.

A car drove by slowly, enough so that she could look inside of it, and in the passenger seat was a young girl, frowning, hands pressed to the window. She saw the girl, and smiled slightly, seeing herself in the curves of the girl's face -- and she reached out a hand, fingers gradually curving down as the car drove away.

The girl looked confused, and scratched her head, knowing she had seen something but not knowing what it was that she had seen.

Eventually, she reached an area where there was wind again, and a few trees, leaning sadly to one side or the other. It was a park, if a small one, and she walked into it, resting one hand on a tree and closing her eyes. She felt the grain of the tree's bark, fingers sliding up and down, stopping slightly at each bump and indentation, learning the side of trunk with her hand. After a moment, her other hand also found the trunk, and she stood, eyes closed, facing the tree, hands shivering as they wandered. She opened her eyes and exhaled, and as she did, the wind blew, bringing the branches of the tree to life, swaying back and forth in the wind. A leaf, orange and red, fell onto her shoulder, and she smiled at it, patting the side of the tree.

To her, it was as if the tree responded, the branches waving higher and faster, fanning her and sending air across her hands. She could not feel, but watched as it seemed the tree stood up taller, and straighter, seeking the light of the few visible stars rather than the lamps placed regularly through the park, shedding a light that was too white. She felt warm then, despite the wind blowing over her face harder than before; she did not mind the hair mingling into a single, thinner mass of one length, or the flapping as one button of her overcoat ripped out of place, sending a flap of fabric wildly off to her right before it was caught by the rest of the coat, pulled back -- and the cycle repeated, the overcoat's bottom looking like a sail.

She looked up at the tree, half its leaves still obscuring the sky, and then down to the ground, a trimmed and pale grass with a sparse coating of fresh leaves bringing color. She looked around the park, and saw a scarce few other people, most of them sleeping, laying on benches and wrapped in fabric whose color had long since faded. A few looked at her, as her motions now were wilder, freer, and yet slower; she reached upward to touch a branch, and held it for a number of seconds, letting go and watching it waver up and down as it settled back into place, seeming to resonate for an instant with itself. It was almost as if she could hear it through her artificial silence; though it made no sound in her ears, she knew it was resounding within her and outside her, and she placed her forehead on the tree trunk to be closer to it.

After a moment it was gone, and she stepped back, kissing the palm of her hand and resting it against the tree. An older woman walked over to her, bent to one side and frowning curiously. The woman's mouth moved, and inside her head she could feel the faint echoing of a sound, enveloped by the wind. Then as the wind died down, letting her hair settle to one side of her face, slowly curving back, she found herself saying, the words ringing clearly inside herself, ``I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you?''

The woman blinked and coughed, leaning slightly on a cane. ``I asked if you were all right, young lady.''

She smiled, the lamps dimming in obeisance. ``I'm fine,'' she said, her voice merging with the breeze. ``I'm fine.''