A few years after the catastrophe, they reinvented sound for the silence, so if you were rich enough you could hear again. It worked by some sort of pressure manipulation within the walls of your skull, and although I’m sure they could have come up with some elegant design for the devices the demand was so high they didn’t really bother. Subsequently it looked like you were wearing suction cups on your ears, the sort of toilet plungers they have in old cartoons that I have no idea whether really existed or not.
If I’d been in charge, I’d have made them look like seashells, iridescent surfaces flickering through visual equivalents to the simulated audio pulsations being forced through the wearer’s skull. But anything can look cool when it signifies wealth and privilege, I suppose, and everyone wanted a pair. They were this year’s hottest fad, even more popular than those hairy sweets everyone seems to like.
For Christmas I bought our kids an hour at one of the sound booths, each of them taking turns while the others stroked their desserts and stared in awe and wonder at the expressions on their siblings’ faces as the pressure undulations stimulated sections of their brain dormant since birth.
Our hour was up before I got a chance to use them. On the way home, through eyes stinging with barely suppressed tears, I tapped out “What was it like?” They replied with several thumbs up, two love hearts, and fifty seven consecutive Ed Sheeran emojis.
Now the tears flowed. They would not stop.
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Notes:
1. Written on December 12, 2022
2. Song title taken from this song that I used to love
3. And still like quite a bit