Unheard Songs and Silent Sounds

by Alexis Dubon

Marmalade skies glow behind winter caribou, casting a neon limn around bristly antlers. The sparkle of starfish shaped snowflakes catch on each little hair, making them glitter in the fading sun. If you close your eyes and hold your breath and stay perfectly still, maybe you’ll even hear them twinkle. Probably not, but it’s nice to pretend. Romantic, dreamy, fantastical. Quixotic, the others would call it, which is why you don’t say any of this out loud. Fantastic garbage, they’d say, a waste of time.

But maybe they do twinkle. Tiny chimes and trills. Maybe they’re just not for our ears. Maybe the sparkles of snow are singing to the stars, trying to woo them down out of the sky. Would their kisses taste like sand set on fire? Or like the slow glisten of moonlight when it licks the sea?

You wouldn’t say any of this out loud either. You know they think you exist only to annoy them. These are people who see nothing but meat when they watch caribou graze on mountain slopes of crystal frost. Footprints are tracks to pursue, not stories told in shattered glass. Grunts in the distance are location giveaways, not the transfiguration of silence-swaddled valleys into amphitheaters. They’re only interested in what serves them, and that’s not things that fall from the sky. Things to butcher, things to count, things measured in money. Their language is numbers. Their dreams are ladders.

What do the caribou dream of? Or do they dream at all? You imagine a dreamless life—one where sleep is new-moon-empty because it doesn’t need to be anything other than sleep, perfectly still and perfectly silent. You imagine eyelids that rise with the sun. And in the light of each new day, everything exists again as if it never didn’t.

Or maybe the caribou do dream, but not because they have to. Maybe they dream of things only a mind without need to escape itself could—dreams that carry them above their bodies and over the atmosphere, hung up high in a sky so soundless, they can hear everything.

Even the things that nothing on earth is able to, like the song of starfish shaped snowflakes that twinkle on bristles of caribou antlers. Maybe the caribou know things we could never understand. Maybe their language is music. Maybe their dreams are stars.

Alexis Dubon is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. She is the author of Nineteen Little Stab Wounds (a microfiction chapbook) and co-editor of No Trouble at All (Cursed Morsels Press, 2023). You can find her short fiction in Southwest Review and Cosmic Horror Monthly, or in Why Didn’t You Just Leave, but she has no social media or website, so you probably won’t ever find Alexis herself.