There are so many kinds of screams.
A mother’s scream as her whole body tightens like a fist and pushes a baby into the world, wrapped in blood and mucus, but no less beautiful for all that.
The child’s scream as it realizes it is alive, awake, and alone—no longer part of the mother. Fragile and aware of temperature, sounds, smells, and pain. With no other way to articulate its reaction to everything, the soul in the tiny envelope of flesh screams.
The screams of erotic intensity that accompanied the copulation that created that child. The screams of lovers everywhere as all of their awareness is instantly distilled down to a moment of pleasure so exquisite that all other thoughts are shouted to silence.
The scream of a woman taken with no thought to producing anything but humiliation.
The scream of someone in such need that they masturbate over and over and over again and manage to conjure no lover, no tenderness, no touch other than their own.
The screams that take an angry person higher, past fury and into the blind purity of rage.
The screams of the dying who realize that they are so badly wounded that no amount of clinging to something physical—a hand, a rifle, a pillow, a Bible—will overpower the coldness that will drag them down.
The screams of grief of those watching their loved ones die, and in that moment understanding the gap between their perceptions of their own power and their control over the world.
The screams of children at play, that ultrasonic burst of pure joy.
The screams of someone suddenly accomplishing a thing that they—and everyone—thought was beyond their power. Pulling someone from under a car, defeating an impossible opponent, clambering over the last crag of a mountain, crossing the finish line an inch before a better runner, smashing that last overhand with such force the racquet strings break but the ball lands an inch inside the line.
The scream of sudden pain, sudden loss, sudden heartbreak, sudden joy, sudden despair.
So many screams.
And there are the screams that no ear can hear, from the sad and lonely and desperate who have lost their voices but scream all the same.
As the big man with the faces tattooed on his skin gathered the small woman into his arms, another scream filled the air. Only the nightbirds outside the tattoo parlor heard it, though. Only they could.
Them and a fat blowfly crawling along the inside of the store’s picture window.
It was such a small voice, thin, fading. But the shriek rose into the air and sent the birds scattering.
“Làm ơn đừng quên tôi.”
Over and over again.
Only the nightbirds heard it. Only they saw the thin figure standing in the street, reaching with bloodied fingers toward the figures inside the tattoo parlor. A little girl, broken and discarded. They saw her hands clawing the air as if it were somehow possible to pull the small woman and big man to her. To force them to see her, to know she was there.
“Làm ơn đừng quên tôi.”
Even after it turned a corner and was lost to sight.
“Làm ơn đừng quên tôi.”
Mommy … don’t forget me.…