“It’s already decided.”
That night, as she unpacked her small suitcase in her bedroom, Clara cried for the first time since it all began. She didn’t make a sound. She simply let her tears fall on her mother’s old dress, as if each one buried a piece of the life she would never have again.
The first few days were cold by any measure. Elias rose before dawn, went out to tend the cattle, repair fences, or chop wood, and returned with his clothes soaked in smoke and wind. Clara cooked, swept, sewed, and washed in silence. They communicated using a notebook.
“There’s going to be a storm.”
“I have to check the well.”
“The flour is in the top drawer.”
Nothing else.
However, on the eighth day something changed.
Clara awoke in the middle of the night to a harsh, muffled sound, like the groan of a man trying to keep quiet. She left the room and found Elias on the floor near the fireplace, his hand pressed against the side of his head. His face was contorted with pain, his skin slick with sweat, and his body tense like a rope about to snap.
Clara knelt beside him.
-What’s the problem?
Of course, he couldn’t hear her. But he saw her lips move, and with a trembling hand, he grabbed the notebook. He wrote only two crooked words.
“It happens often.”
Clara didn’t believe him. No one who “does it often” ends up like this, writhing on the floor.
She brought him a damp cloth, helped him lie down, and stayed with him until the spasm subsided. Before falling asleep, Elias wrote a single sentence.
“Thank you.”
From that moment on, Clara began to observe. She saw how, some mornings, he involuntarily brought his hand to the right side of his head. She saw bloodstains on the pillow. She saw the way he suppressed the pain, as if it had become part of his routine. One evening, she asked him in writing how long he had been behaving this way.
Elijah answered:
“Ever since I was a child, doctors said it was related to my deafness and that there was no cure.”
Clara replied:
“Did you believe it?”
It took him a while to respond.
“NO.”
Three nights later, Elias fell from his chair in the middle of dinner. The thud reverberated on the floor. Clara ran to him. He was writhing in pain, clutching his head. She shone a flashlight on his face, gently brushed his hair aside, and peered into his swollen ear. What she saw made her blood run cold.
There was something there.
Something dark.
Something alive.
He moved.
Clara stepped back for a moment, her heart pounding, then took a deep breath, like someone leaping into the void. She prepared hot water, thin sewing tweezers, and denatured alcohol. Elias, pale and sweaty, looked at her with suspicion and fear. He wrote with a steady hand:
“You have something in your ear. Let me take it out.”
He vehemently denied it. He snatched the notebook from her hand and wrote:
“It’s dangerous.”
Clara picked up the pencil and replied:
“It’s more dangerous to leave him there. Do you trust me?”
Elias held her gaze for what seemed like an eternity. Then, very slowly, he nodded.
Clara worked with shaking hands, but her determination was unwavering. She slowly inserted the tweezers, while he gripped the edge of the table until his face turned pale. She felt resistance. Then a tug. And suddenly, something emerged, writhing from the metal.
Part 2…
A long, dark millipede covered in blood.
It fell into a glass jar filled with alcohol. Clara stared at it in horror. Elias, however, looked at her… and then it shattered.
For the first time since she had known him, she cried.
Not with discreet tears, but with deep, heart-rending sobs, like a man who had suddenly regained twenty-five years of his life. He covered his face with his hands, his head bowed in an ancient pain that was no longer physical, but of the soul.
Clara hugged him without thinking.
And he didn’t look away.
The next morning, Elias left the room with a clearer vision than ever. He pointed to the jar on the table and wrote:
“It was all true.”
Clara nodded.
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