Operation 2020

The cafe buzzes with so many voices it plugs my ears with the artillery of human noise. Man Behind Me taps my shoulder, gestures toward the cashier lady with her fatigued makeup. I am familiar with this. I spent hours in my room manufacturing my voice into something more human. In elementary school, my speech therapist awarded me with stickers for each sharp, beautiful word wrestled from my lips and for each accurate guess of my speech therapist’s sharp, beautiful sentences when she spoke behind a piece of paper that obscured her thin, caterpillar lips. Soon, I was guessing and saying everything with success, most days. These days because of the masks, less so. My speech therapist once told my mother that the hard-of-hearing often have prairie voices: flat-toned. She said this with as little of herself present, automatic like a coffee machine. Earlier, I had visited the public library and read in a parenting article that hard-of-hearing kids take things too literally. Hence my volatile confusion in elementary school when my speech therapist told me to “bite the bullet.” Hence my mother, after speaking with the speech therapist, going over a thin, crack-spined book of English idioms with me for weeks after. I cried in the library after reading the article until I thought I heard someone tell me to shut up though I saw nobody around, nobody at all.