Large Ears

They lived in a two-room flat with peeling walls, where it rained inside all day. It rained in the other room, thankfully, so they could sleep in a drier place. The roof leaked so much they referred to that room as the rainforest.

The two couldn’t be more different from each other if they tried. They stuck together because they couldn’t afford the rent alone, and no one else wanted them. They had to stick together. But they were very different: the second was rather short, with almost elfish, pointed ears, a smile that bordered on a smirk, twinkling eyes, deep brown eyes, and hair that were cut the right length. He was what one would call a charmer. He could talk the shoes off of a horse.

The first, however, was much quieter. He moved slower, and blinked his eyes a lot. He had trouble sleeping too, for his mind was always thinking, though he barely ever spoke. He had always been told by everyone except his mother that he had rather large ears, but his mother had told him to ignore them. He tried his best to, too, but it was slightly hard to do when one could hear even the smallest whisper.

His ears were almost twice the size of his head, and although it was sometimes a nuisance to deal with, he liked that it gave him enhanced hearing. He enjoyed soft music, which sometimes was too soft for anyone else to hear, and he never spoke harder than a whisper. In conversations with people prone to losing their temper and shouting, he could hardly take part for more than a minute. His ears could start bleeding. He kept to himself a lot.

The second complained all day long of mosquitoes. They bothered the first a lot too, but he had learnt to live with them, as he had learnt to live with a lot of other things. But when the second moved in, he positively couldn’t stand them. He had to get rid of them. Lots were drawn. Each day, it was decided by lots who would swat away the mosquitoes while the other slept. Curiously, a disproportionate number of times, it would be the first’s turn to do so.

He didn’t complain.

The second soon took a liking to the first, and affectionately referred to him as Large Ears. Though he tended to shout the name while thumping the first’s back, the first didn’t say much.

Large Ears did not enjoy leaving the apartment. He wasn’t fond of the outside traffic, and the noise of the hustle-bustle. He preferred staying inside by himself. The second good-naturedly agreed to get him his supplies every time he went out. Large Ears thanked him profusely, in whispers, and winced quietly to himself, when the second replied in his booming voice that it was quite alright and to not mention it.

Large Ears did not mention it again.

One day, along with all his own supplies, and Large Ears’, the second bought home an interesting device: an app on his smartphone, called the Mosquito Destroyer.

Large Ears was curious about what it was, and asked him to play it for him. The second oblidged, pointing it to a swarm of mosquitoes nearby. The mosquitoes ran almost instantaneously, and the second clapped happily, and turned to Large Ears.

But Large Ears was down on the floor, trying in vain to cover his floppy ears with his small hands, begging in whispers to stop.

The second stopped the app, and asked him what had happened, whereupon Large Ears explained that there was a strange sound emanating from the app; a sound so shrill it made him want to shrivel up and die.

‘Bah, it’s nothing,’ laughed the second, but Large Ears kept pleading.

‘It’s ultrasonic, you’re not even supposed to hear it,’ the second waved him away, but Large Ears kept pleading, pointing to his sensitive ears.

‘What about the mosquitoes?’ asked the second.

Large Ears tried to convince the second that he would manually kill each mosquito every day, that they would do away with the lots too, and that it would be his personal responsibility to keep them away, if only the second would kindly stop the sounds.

The second was adamant.

‘If a single one of them so much as touches me, I promise you, the deal is off.’

They shook on that, and the second closed his app, switched off his phone, and promptly fell asleep.

Large Ears swatted each mosquito he saw all night. The clock read two-thirty, and he thought he’d done all he could. Tired, and sweaty, he decided to go to sleep, after looking around one more time to ensure no mosquitoes survived.

The clock read three when he was woken up by an angry second.

Why had he let the mosquitoes in again? The second asked.

Large Ears by now was sort of annoyed. He was sleepy, and he had been woken up in the middle of a nice dream he had been dreaming. He decided not to get up at all no matter what the second did. The second screamed at him for half an hour, and finally gave up, and went to sleep.

The next day, Large Ears woke up, and the second was nowhere to be found.

After brushing, and making his breakfast, and doing the crossword, Large Ears thought he heard something out of the door. At first hesitant, Large Ears realized he would have to go and check what it was. He slowly walked to the door, hoping to get a clearer idea of what the sound was, but he could not tell. Hesitantly, he put his ear to the door.

No sooner had he done that than the sound stopped. He took a step back inadvertently, confused. A second later, the lock turned, and in walked the second.

‘What are you doing?’

Large Ears shook his head and whispered that he had heard something at the door, but the second shrugged his shoulders and told him there was nothing outside.

Large Ears went back to doing his crossword.

At night, Large Ears bade his friend good night and went to sleep.

The clock read three when Large Ears woke up quicker than lightning. He screamed and held his ears, and cried. It was the horrible noise again. It seemed to Large Ears that the shrill noise cut through his skin, entered his veins and spread like poison all over his brains. He couldn’t think straight, as he recoiled, his body contorted in an impossible shape, as his mind sent waves of pain throughout his body: from his head all the way through his spine right down to his feet. His toes curled as he screamed, as loud as he could. He screamed louder than the sound itself.

Within seconds, he could feel the coppery taste of blood on the base of his throat. That was when he was shaken by the second, asking him what the bloody matter was.

‘It was the sound!’ whispered Large Ears.

‘What sound?’

And indeed, as the second said it, Large Ears realized that there was no sound. The sound, he realized, had ceased to exist as soon as his throat tore open.

 ‘You used the app?’ asked Large Ears, trying hard not to cough out blood.

‘You woke me up, you bastard,’ laughed the second, ‘what app are you talking about? Are you still asleep?’

Had he imagined it? Had he dreamt it? He didn’t know.

He whispered an apology to the second, and went back to sleep.

A week went by, and all was well. Large Ears’ throat recovered with honey and rest. He spent his time doing the crossword and listening to mellow music. He saw a cat on the sill, which tried to scratch him through the glass, but the second said it was trying to make friends with him. It seemed to be a good week.

But one night, yet again, as the clock struck three, Large Ears got up yet again in mortal agony.

This time, though, it seemed to last a lot less longer. The second, almost as if he was prepared, shook Large Ears again, and Large Ears realized, yet again, that the sounds had subsided. He murmured an apology, and fell asleep again.

The third time was only three days later. The fourth, a day later. By the time the fifth time came by, it was a daily occurrence. Always at three, and always ending in a shaking of Large Ears, and an apology.

Large Ears was beside himself with anxiety. He couldn’t sleep anymore. He couldn’t think anymore because of lack of sleep. He couldn’t do the crosswords anymore, or swat mosquitoes anymore. He couldn’t understand what was happening. He read psychology books to try to find an answer, and even looked up his symptoms on the search bar of Google. But nothing.

When the eighteenth time came by, Large Ears didn’t need the second to wake himself up. He had had enough. He got up and slapped himself, telling himself he’d simply been imagining the noise. Near him, the second slept soundly.

Large Ears tried to be jolly, and tell himself the sound did not exist at all but in his mind, but the sound kept ringing through his skull, sending jolts into his body. Stuttering, but trying to speak louder to drown out the noise, Large Ears told himself how much fun he would have the next day solving the crossword. Large Ears spoke louder and louder in vain, as the sound kept piercing him like an arrow dipped in acid; worse, a needle ripping through cloth again and again and again, stitching together a symphony of wounds nothing but the loss of hearing could stop.

Large Ears spoke so loudly, his ears started bleeding. For a second, he thought it was the sound, and he raised his eyebrows, wondering if the sound wasn’t in his imagination, and was actually real. But of course, a second later, he realized it was just his voice that had burst his eardrums.

How could it be the sound? There was no app. The second was asleep the whole time. It was just him, and his insecurities, cutting away at him, first with a dull blade, now with a needle.

But he had something better: a sharp knife.

It was neither dull nor a needle, and he knew what he had to do with it. It was the only way. His mother would perhaps have cheered him on had she been there to see him. She tried her best to get him to fit in with the others, telling him his ears were only slightly larger than normal. No one else agreed, so she told him he had the greatest sense of hearing in the world. She whispered it to him, lest her other children heard it and realized he was her favourite. Large Ears knew how much she needed him to fit in. When he was younger, he had tried tying his ears down, but it had made him even slower, as he couldn’t hear as well as he used to. His mother appreciated his gesture, and bought him a cake. He had cut the cake with a knife, and now he ran to the kitchen, all the time speaking louder and louder. The second never woke up, curiously, from his loud talking. He was a sound sleeper.

The knife glinted to him, as he sat down at the table, drenched from the rain in the other room, which he had briefly entered to get his knife from the kitchen. He hadn’t stayed there because the blood would have mixed with the water, and maybe given him an infection.

He took a breath to steady himself, and made the mistake of stopping his loud rambling. One last time, the heaven-piercing sound cut through him. He shrunk, gasping hard, knocking all the air out of his lungs. Yet, it gave him the strength he needed. Without as much as another second’s delay, he chopped out both his ears with two precise blows.

The bloody knife was put into the sink, along with the other dishes, to soak, and he made his way back to his bed, finally content, and smiling. He couldn’t hear the sound again. The bubbling blood oozing out of both his ears cushioned the sound even more, and Large Ears slept a long, long, dreamless sleep.

In the morning, when the second woke up, he found a trail of semi-dried blood from the table to Large Ears’ bed, soaking his head and his mattress. His hair were matted with dried blood, and wet with fresh blood still pouring out of two large holes in the sides of his skull.

Large Ears seemed to be dead.

The second smirked, and shook his head, tut-tutting to Large Ears’ pale, unmoving body. ‘You shouldn’t have let that mosquito near me. We had a deal. We had a bloody deal.’

He opened the window to allow some ventilation, and rushed to the other room, with an umbrella, looking for a mop.

Large Ears never heard anything again.