Pilot Holes

by Colton Adrian

You wouldn’t think so, but even silence has a sound. Even underground, through torchlit tunnels and between concrete enforced walls you can hear it. Even when you get kidnapped and locked to a chair with enough chain to lasso a Georgia Pine, it comes from inside you, past your eardrums. Because even when an electric drill has spun both eardrums to a soft pulp and tiny rivers of blood trickle from each ear, even then, the silence is the loudest.

Why? Well, that doesn’t matter but what your brain is trying to do is make up for the lack of stimuli. Or in this case, the destruction of any future indication of stimuli coming in through your mashed potato eardrums. It’s the T.V. on in the background to make things less awkward. It’s the fan that helps you fall asleep at night. It’s a constant voice that’s only talking to you every time you aren’t listening. You try to loosen the chains but they get tighter, and the driller goes slower when you squirm.

Funny it seems, how suddenly eager to perceive information when balanced on the edge of death. Sad it seems, how life itself is less worth listening to than what follows it. And I know it seems like this loud silence I’m talking about is just the whirl of the drill bouncing around your skull, but it isn’t. When your crafty friend is switching out the battery from the drill you can still hear it. Try to make out the words, but you can’t understand yet. Try to focus and the silence grows louder and more sporadic. You think maybe the sound is residue from being knocked unconscious prior to being slammed in a hollow trunk for transport. Maybe it’s coming from the DMT being released from your pineal gland during this n(ear) death experience. Whatever the silent sound is, it can’t be what I’m telling you it is because why haven’t you heard it before? No way this is real anyway, right? Right on track with your Kübler-Ross, but you’ve lost too much blood to get angry enough for the next stage. You should have tried bargaining for a smaller drill bit an hour or two ago. You might have heard me sooner.

I don’t know how you’re not dead yet. You look like a colander with all those pilot holes driven across your head. You stopped trying to loosen the chains a few holes ago. You can’t hear anything but silence as each hole gets filled with a cobalt blue concrete screw. The twin lead threading on the screws themselves provide swift insertion into your brain at an angle for reduced settling torque.

The idea is to get all the screws secure before you bleed out. The craftsman would like a moment or two of admiration for his work while you are still breathing. Each breath gets shorter as the sound of silence gets louder. His masterpiece is complete. Look how beautiful you are thirty feet underground glistening sticky red. Marvelous, really.

Now close your eyes. I need you to concentrate real hard so you can make out my voice. Look inside yourself and know me. Last chance. I’ve been here all along but now you can finally understand what I’ve been saying. You are finally willing to listen.

Just when I’m all out of shit to say.

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