Screaming but Silent

Non-Fiction | Milo

My days and nights have one constant: my love of music. Whether on the bus, train or my very feet my ears are always plugged into my phone, as I go about my business. This is a short piece I thought up whilst listening to "War" by The Blood of Heroes. Milo out.  

The bus arrives on time, and courtesy of the free, yet often laggy, app on my phone I know I am lucky; the next bus isn't due for another twenty minutes. I wait patiently for those around me to get onto the bus first, not due to any sense of manners or decency but simply because I am engrossed in the track I am listening to.

“War!”

Justin Broadrick's recognisable snarl, hoarse and bastardly curls my lips and quickens my pulse. Nobody else can hear the madness and swirling guitars, the sparse ambient sounds punctured by the screams of a man transformed by his artistry. Nobody knows of the pounding of my heart as I try to climb the stairs normally, as though my mind wasn't being ripped from the present and deposited somewhere else, somewhere in a fetid and desperate future, where man ravaged by his excesses lives in the remains of a nuclear fallout...I am slipping in and out of a daydream. It is egotistical but also productive, I want to write a story or read one that reimagines the scream.

I am upstairs and sitting on the left hand side of the top deck, right behind the stairs. As the beat stills and Dr Israel's disembodied voice rehearses a chant of some sort, I am stilled and the flush of feeling is no more. In a sudden fit of self-consciousness, I feel embarrassed, could anybody hear the music as it increased in volume and fury? Was my face visibly twisted by the track, and were my eyes glazed and distant? Would I appear stricken, with a perfect glob of drool pendant on puckered lips, by the security camera? The music picks up once more and I am carried off again.

“War! War! War!”

I hear screaming, I hear my blood, I feel my heart quicken and grow bold and busy. It wants to move me, no, it wants to move itself. The song comes to an end, and the next track that comes on isn't an appropriate fit for my current mood. The “War” is over but the journey continues and as the bus passes from stop to stop, and my fingers push "next" on my unresponsive phone again and again I hear the echo of a scream, despite the silence around me.