None of the crackly rasp of vocal fry that the music-hater refugee, Fatima, had.

As she spoke, the Black Screams grew quieter.

“Don’t know anyplace back home like it, that I can think of,” he said, because that was what somebody from back home would say. He thought New York City was like this actually but, given his recent adventures there, he didn’t volunteer that observation.

She rambled, charmingly, about being in the south of France most recently, had he ever been? No? Too bad. Oh, Cap d’Antibes. Oh, Nice!

The screams abated some more as he listened. He looked too: such a beautiful young woman.

Such a lovely voice.

And those tapping boots! Like a rosewood drum.

Stefan had had lovers, of course. But in the old days. Before what the doctors would call—though never to his face—the Break, at around age twenty-two. It was then that he had simply given up fighting to be normal and stepped, comforted, into the world of sounds. Around the time Mommy went all quiet in the cellar, quiet and cold, in the quiet and hot cellar, the washing machine spinning the last load of towels ever washed in the house.

Around the time Father decided he wasn’t going to be aproned to a troubled son anymore.

Before then, though, before the Break, sure, there’d been the occasional pretty girl, those who didn’t mind the strange.

He rather enjoyed them—the occasional nights—though the sensation grew less interesting than the sounds of joining. Flesh made subtle noises, hair might, tongues did, moisture did.

Nails did.

Throats and lungs and hearts, of course.

Then, though, the strange got stranger and the girls started to look away more and more. They started to mind. Which was fine with him because he was losing interest himself. Sherry or Linda would whisper about taking her bra off and he’d be wondering about the sound of Thomas Jefferson’s voice, or what the groans of the Titanic had been like as she went down.

Now the young woman in the cowboy boots said, “So, I’m here for a few days is all. My girlfriend, the one I was traveling with? She broke up with her boyfriend before she left, but then he called and they got back together so she just went home, pout, pout. And abandoned me! How about that? But here I am in Italy! I mean, like, I’m going back to Cleveland early? Don’t think so. So here I am. Talking and talking and talking. Sorry. People say I do that. Talk too much.”

Yes, she did.

But Stefan was smiling. He could affect a good smile. “No, it’s all good.”

She wasn’t put off by his silence. She asked, “What’re you doing here? You in school?”

“No, I’m working.”

“Oh, what do you do?”

Presently slipping nooses around people’s necks.

“Sound engineer.”

“No way! Concerts, you mean?”

With the Black Screams now at bay he was able to act normal, as he knew he had to. He ran through his arsenal of blandly normal tones and words and launched a few. “I wish. Testing for noise pollution.”