Sight And Sound

• Yarden Yarom, Grade 11, Urrbrae Agricultural High School
• Short Story
• 2015

Excellence Award in the 'Read Write Repeat 2015' competition

Can you tell me about the sky?
The awkward, shaky handwriting that covered the whiteboard was as familiar to Lyrica as her own handwriting, and easily read by the girl despite overlapping letters and diagonally written words.
“The sky isn’t nice. It’s dark and angry and grey. We should come back some other time if you want nice skies,” Lyrica said softly in English as muffled as her best friend’s writing, but Sarina could understand her friend’s words as well as Lyrica could her handwriting.
Sarina was lying on her back in the grass, only an arm’s length away from her, unseeing eyes, staring upwards at the sun. Sometimes, Lyrica would wonder what her friend would say if she could see the world. The same as what she herself would say if she could hear the world, she thought.
“What can you hear?” Lyrica asked her.
Sarina extended a hand, and Lyrica placed the whiteboard in the girl’s hands, letting go when she saw Sarina’s long fingers curl around the edge. Sarina picked up the marker from where it was lying next to her before carefully feeling her way to the edge of the whiteboard and beginning to write furiously while Lyrica watched.
When Sarina let go of the board, Lyrica sat up, deciphering the small writing that covered the whole board.
There is always so much to hear. Jean hear the grass move with you, and the trees move in the wind, and the calls of birds not too far away. If you look in one of the trees to the left you might see them. Adrian used to say that birds were so beautiful...
Lyrica turned to look at her friend, and Sarina sensed the worry coming off her. She swiped at the air, hoping to be able to grab the whiteboard, and soon found it pressed back in her hands.
“Clean?” Sarina spoke slowly, letting her friend read her lips.
“Yes,” the reply came a second after. Lyrica had never really gotten the hang of lip reading, but for some small words, she could manage if she made an effort.
Sarina wrote across the board, letters she had been taught by the very man she spoke about. Their beloved teacher, who had brought them together and treated them as equals. Who understood what it was like for society not to understand. Who fought bravely until his disease took him away. Sarina had always been closer to him, having known him for longer, but Lyrica still felt his loss.
He wouldn’t want us to be sad.
“I can see a bird. It’s small but it’s fast, and it wears the same brown Adrian would wear.”
He would have liked to be a bird.
“So we’ll call it Adrian?”
May he fly far.