"The Sirens" by Gabe Mangan

Prose - Grapevine, Spring 24/25

Beginning

I sat at the dinner table in my house, eating. My family sat there, too. They were talking about their days. At work, at school, at home. I was barely listening, sitting in silence. Petrified, but I would say rightly so. I let the conversation fade in and out as I ate, getting little snapshots of what they were talking about.

“Ugh, my boss is so annoying. Do you know what he said today? He…,” said my mother.

“I got an ‘A’ on my math test!” said my little brother.

“I cleaned the bathroom and living room today,” said my father.

None of this mattered anyway. The sirens still blared outside, as if screaming. The sound filled my head, my body, my soul. I couldn’t bear it. Every day. Every day. Every day. Inescapable. Every day.

“How can you sit here and talk about this shit?!” I blurted out. Everyone looked at me, concern on their faces.

“What do you mean, hon?” asked my mother.

“The sirens! They’re so loud, so urgent, and you don’t do anything!”

“Oh hon, they’ve been doing that for a long time. You know that.”

“What sirens?” asked my brother. We ignored him, as we always do when the subject is brought up. It was for his own good, after all, to not know.

“Y’know, you keep saying it’s always been this way, but I’ve never heard any proof. If they’ve been going for so f***ing long, why is there no old recording of the sirens? Why are they so quiet in old news clips? Old shows? Old movies?”

“Oh, they had special equipment to dampen the noise.”

“WHAT!” I shouted, exasperated and slightly panicked, “So they had the ability to dampen it in the seventies, but not today!?”

My father shook his head. “Sofie, I have some old TV recordings of the news that my father gave me. Would you like to watch them to see that it’s always been like this?”

“Fine.” I said, breathing heavily.

He went to his bedroom while the rest of us waited at the table, alone in our interpersonal silence with the sound of sirens in the background, fighting, fighting to be in the foreground. He came back out carrying a disk case, opening it as he walked towards the TV. He popped in the disk, hit play, and the sound of a siren blared from the TV, much deeper and quieter than the sirens outside, as if calmer, less panicked. Less alarming. As the picture faded in, revealing the man who was president 70 years ago, he began to speak. Speak. Not shout, like everyone has to do now. The sirens were so much quieter on the old broadcast.

I shook my head in frustration and pulled out my phone and found a video to play. The sound of the siren from my phone drowned out the sound from the TV. It matched the pitch of the sirens outside.

“Can you not hear the difference?!” I screamed.

“Let’s just drop it,” my mom said, turning off the TV with the remote.

Ending One

And so I did. After that day, I never spoke to my family about the sirens ever again. At some point, two or three years later, my brother called me in a panic, shouting at me that something had to be done. I told him he was being silly, that everything was fine. Then I hung up.  After all, everything was fine. The sirens had remained, growing louder and higher of course, but nothing really happened. Nothing ever happened, and the world kept on spinning. 

My parents were right. Nothing ever happened, and the world kept on spinning. 

*

I was shopping when it happened. It was midafternoon, and, as always, the sirens blared. It had been twenty years since my father showed me the news clip, just five years since my brother called me. It passed so quickly. The sirens had been growing steadily louder, more insistent that entire time, and I ignored it as my parents had told me to. At some point, people’s ears began to bleed. Everyone ignored it, because it really wasn’t that painful, and eventually it became the norm. The same thing happened when people started to go into random coughing fits. It just became the new normal. Which of course it was. Normal, that is.

When I was in the check-out lane, though, something happened. Everyone around me started coughing, rasping, grasping at their throats. They were coughing up blood, and their ears were bleeding profusely. I fell over, too, and began to do the same. It was so painful, as if my body was trying to expel my heart through my mouth and ears. Eventually, it stopped and I stood up. Looking around, it seemed like only about three-quarters of the people around me were getting back up. The rest of them laid on the ground, silent. Dead.

This, too, became normal after just a few weeks of it happening every few days. Everybody around the world adjusted the way they lived to accommodate these fits. They got used to watching people around them die on the floor. And it was normal. All of us were just waiting to die. And all the while, the sirens reached a fever pitch.

Ending Two

“NO!” I screamed, “C’mon, you can’t say that! We have to do something!”

“Well maybe you can be the one to fix it,” my mother said.

I bolted to my room and slammed the door. I flung myself onto the bed sobbing. That’s how I slept that night. That’s how I slept every night for a long while. Years crying myself to sleep, with nothing but the sirens to accompany my wails. 

One night, my brother called me in a panic. He was crying, saying that something needed to be done about the sirens. It broke me to hear him say it. To hear someone who had been innocent for so long cry about it. So I told him about a group of people that had figured a way to stop the sound. They simply wore noise-canceling headphones, and lived in peace and quiet. I hadn’t taken up the practice, though I didn’t really know why. It seemed like a good idea, to not have to listen to the soul-crushing, all-consuming sirens. I think I had thought that to be a well-rounded person, I needed to hear the sirens cry. How silly. I took up the practice, wearing noise-cancelling headphones everywhere I went. The world was so much more peaceful that way. 

At some point, people started bleeding from their ears and having awful coughing fits. It was a terrible, terrible sight to see, so we began to wear blindfolds as well to maintain the peace that we had lived in. I was told many times that I was strange for wearing the blindfold and the headphones, but I didn’t care. I was happy.

*

About five years later, something strange happened. The sirens had been growing steadily louder and more panicked that entire time. I had even been forced to get better noise cancelling headphones multiple times just to block out the growing noise. 

It started midafternoon one day, when I was in the check-out lane, grocery shopping. At first, I thought my ears were ringing, but it was the sirens. I could hear them again. I sighed, knowing that I’d have to get new headphones. The sound kept getting louder as I finished checking out and turned to go back into the store to get new headphones. As I was walking, though, I tripped over something. Then something else. And then again. Finally, I took off my blindfold to look around, and all around me people were on the floor, their bodies twisted in what looked like pain as their ears bled heavily and they coughed up blood. 

I stepped back and tripped over somebody else that had fallen behind me, landing on my butt. The sirens were getting so loud, louder than they had been for me in so, so long. And then I felt something in my ears. I reached my hand up and felt a warm, sticky liquid. Blood. I panicked. I jumped up and ran to get new headphones. I must’ve jumped over two dozen people to get there. Once I got my hands on a new pair of headphones, I ripped them out of the packaging and replaced my old ones. For the brief moment that I could hear the sirens more clearly, I felt as if my eardrums nearly burst. But then it was quiet again. 

I looked around. The people on the ground had stopped moving. Most had gotten up. Some of them, though, laid motionless on the ground. I put my blindfold back on, and the world was peaceful again.

Ending Three

“NO!” I screamed, “C’mon, you can’t say that! We have to do something!”

“What do we do?” my mother asked, clearly exasperated at this point, “Hm? What do you think we should do to help?”

“I don’t f***ing know!” I yelled, “But we can’t just do nothing!”

“We can’t do anything if you don’t have an idea, because we don’t,” my father yelled.

And on and on it went. Any time I spoke to my parents after that, we fought. In fact, I fought with almost everyone in my life. I fought with people online, I would always tell cashiers and waiters that something needed to be done. At some point, late at night, my brother called me, crying, telling me that we had to do something about the sirens. 

“What do we do?” I asked him. I could hear him stammering on the other end.

“What do we do, then, huh?!” I asked, frustrated.

“I-I dunno!” he said. 

“Well then, f*** off!” I shouted, and hung up. I walked over to my bed, and I could feel my eyes watering. I flung myself onto the mattress and screamed into the pillow, and for a brief moment, the pitch of my wails matched that of the sirens. I stopped. I screamed again, louder this time, and again my pitch matched the sirens, and I felt good. I felt happy. I hadn’t felt really happy for so, so long. 

*

Five years and one day after my brother called, I laid in my bed again. Screaming, at the top of my lungs, matching the pitch of the sirens, so that, even for a moment, they were dampened. Even when people started bleeding from their ears, even when they started collapsing into coughing fits during their daily commutes, I had done the same thing every day for the past half-decade. My throat was on fire, and when I wasn’t screaming it felt like it had been ripped to shreds. But God, did it feel good every night to scream. To hear my neighbors pounding on my walls, telling me to stop, disturbed by the noise. To feel the pain in my throat. At some point, I told my neighbors how good it felt to do, and that same night I could hear them screaming, too. And the sirens were forced further back into the background, our screams filling the foreground. Soon, everyone in the building was screaming at night in the most beautiful, human chorus I’d ever heard. 

But that night, the sirens were too high. We couldn’t match their pitch. But God did we try. I could hear people trying all night, destroying their vocal cords, making themselves hoarse. But as the sirens got higher and higher and louder and louder, people’s screaming became broken, as if interrupted every few seconds by something. I didn’t know why at first, but whatever. I kept screaming. But then I collapsed, a horrible pain shooting through my head, my ears bleeding profusely. I began to cough, harder than I ever had before, as if my body was trying to eject my heart from my ribcage. Between each cough, I screamed. Everyone else must’ve been too. 

As the night went on, people stopped screaming altogether. Nobody seemed to stop, so I kept going, too. My body convulsing, my ears gushing blood, my coughing more and more violent, and still I screamed. And slowly, as the night went on and my throat was in such pain that it no longer hurt, I was alone, and I was screaming. I was screaming into the void, into the world, begging that someone would hear me. I was screaming into dawn. Screaming. Screaming. Screaming. Dead.