The Girl Who Was a Bell

The girl who was a bell didn’t speak because she had no voice; instead she went about ringing uncontrollably whenever someone looked at her. It started when she was just a child, unsure of what all those prying eyes wanted from her. By the time she reached her seventeenth year, she had grown to loathe being around other people, dreading the painful sounds wrenched from her body whenever she was subjected to their cold and hungry gaze. And so she devised a plan: she would leave the city for the arid emptiness of the badlands, where she would live out the rest of her days in silence, alone and undisturbed.

Her mother, who had been a bell herself once, didn’t approve of her plan. I know it’s irritating, but you get used to it, her mother told her. They communicated telepathically; though her mother had long ago stopped ringing, she still had no voice. Take it from me, one day they’ll stop looking, and then you’ll miss it. You’ll miss the days when you used to ring all the time. But the girl who was a bell didn’t believe her. To miss this daily torture, to look back upon it fondly? If such a day were to come, it could only mean she had become a stranger to herself.

The girl who was a bell found that life in the badlands suited her very well. She made a den out of a hole in the rugged cliffside, and soon she befriended an amber-eyed coyote who helped her hunt deer and javelina. When they caught one, she would cook it over an open fire and they would have a great feast. When pickings were slim, she made do with the small animals that came to drink at the tinaja in the valley below. It was a good life, all things considered. In time she forgot what it was like to ring, but she couldn’t say she missed it. It was like trying to remember a dream, a sense of urgent recognition unconnected to anything in the real world. It had nothing to do with the way she lived now.

Years passed. The girl who was a bell could see that her hands had grown gnarled and wrinkled, and her body ached in places that had never ached before. Her coyote friend was long gone. From time to time she crossed paths with another in the night, but she had grown used to hunting alone.

One night she saw her reflection in the starry pool of the tinaja. It was the face of a stranger, nut-brown and shriveled. She realized her ringing days were over. It made no difference; she belonged to the badlands now, like the coyote and deer and javelina. The world of other people seemed very far away, so far that she could no longer remember the sound of her own ringing. It seemed to her that it must have been a beautiful sound, and she wondered: Why could I never hear myself clearly? Why did I feel that beauty didn’t belong to me?

The girl who was a bell fell back onto her haunches and dropped her head into her hands. Tears filled her eyes as a strange keening noise began to unfold. It started low and flat, but soon it rose and rose until it was one clear, high note ascending to the heavens, echoing through the vast cathedral of the night. She looked up in alarm, but there was no living creature around her. There was nothing but herself, and the stars.