How I long I sit like this, I don't know. I'm unable to move, in fear of finding his body and confirming his passing. Evening begins trickling lilac gloom into the fog. I sob into my hands, blind, numb, and bitter. I want to be deaf too, to avoid missing the one, and the only one, I want to hear. My auditory perception detects a shift in the pattern of the river's constant gurgling. I hear my answer. My heart skips a beat. A feeble violin moans in the gloomy yonder and falls silent. I spring up and dash in its direction, my feet slipping in mud puddles, my breath ripping my chest. As quickly as it surfaced, the sound disappears. I stop to listen. There it is again, coming from the pile of rocks and dirt a good fifty feet from the fallen fir tree. I stumble, fall, pick myself up, and sprint to the source of the melody. I'm almost too afraid that it's my imagination playing tricks and when I find the spot, there won't be anything there except rock, rock, and more rock.

I stop in front of a hillock and start digging like mad, fingers and nails, one frantic little mole. I throw stones off the pile in all directions, muttering gibberish, hoping against all hope that I'm right. Stones give way to gravel, gravel gives way to dirt. When the dirt shifts, a hand emerges and grabs on to me for dear life.

"Hunter!" I shriek.

I clear his face from the debris, cupping brown sludge and smearing handfuls of it onto my pants until his pale skin is relatively clean. He coughs and opens his eyes, bright blue in contrast to all this dirt. He gulps for air, licking his lips, saying something. I lean my ear closer.

"Water," he mouths, without an actual sound.

"Just a second!" I say and dash to the river. Up close it turns out to be no more than a brook about thirty feet across. It gurgles its merry stream, and I dip into it, wade deeper, and exhale in relief as I dunk my head and drink the melted glacier water. Savoring its sweetness, I inhale it through my cracked gills, and wash my face, the icy water chilling me properly. I stumble out, sliding on mossy pebbles with the precious liquid caught in my palms. Carrying it carefully over to Hunter, I trickle drop by drop between his cracked lips.

"More," he croaks, so quietly that I barely hear it.

I repeat my journey, elated, feeling as if I'm flying, ready to make this thirty-feet trip to the stream and back a million times.

"You're alive," I say on repeat, digging the rest of his frame out until he's free of dirt, resting amidst broken rocks like he's just been pulled from his grave. I lean and lightly press him against my chest.

"You're alive, you're alive, you're alive. I'm so sorry I hurt you, I really am. I lost control, I sort of forgot about everything else. I needed to get rid of the sirens. Ligeia was sucking out your soul and..." I notice his incredulous look. "Are you badly hurt? Will you ever forgive me? Can I—"

"I can't hear you," Hunter utters in a long slur, obviously disoriented. It sounds more like acanthearya.

I fist the end of my wet sweatshirt sleeve and wipe his lips clean. "I said, I'm sorry. I said—"

He grabs me with his left hand, bewildered.

"What? What is it? What's wrong?" I ask, alarmed.

"I can't hear you. I can't hear myself talking. I can't hear nothing." His voice is quiet and garbled, words hardly separated from each other, sounding like one long string.

Paralysis pins me to the ground. I feared this might happen, but I was dutifully pushing this premonition out of my mind, wanting to extend my happiness and not think about it. What a hypocrite.

"You can't hear me?" I repeat like a parrot. "How about now?" I yell into his ear, denying what he told me, not wanting to acknowledge what it means. He doesn't cringe at my voice, which confirms that I must have damaged his eardrums. But wouldn't he be in terrible pain right now if I did? He doesn't look like he is. I fill the awkward silence with rapid action, warbling along.

"Come on, let me carry you, let's figure out a way to get out of here. We'll go to your house and you'll take a bath and a nap and feel better and see your mom and..." I chatter nonsense in hopes of making him feel better, but mostly I hope to make myself feel better. I scoop him by the shoulders and struggle to sit him up. I slip in the mud and fall on my knees. He grabs my arm and insistently pulls me closer to him.

"Stop...I'm deaf...STOP!"

It takes my mind a few seconds to discern separate words from his slurring, and it takes another few seconds to fully register their meaning.

Strength drains from me. The feeling of dread returns, brought on by the horrible mistake I made. I can't reverse it no matter what I do. It's like Hunter's mother and her cancer; this must be how he felt. Hopeless—not wanting to believe what happened, denying the facts.

I break into hysteria.

"What do you mean, stop? What do you mean, you can't hear me? Listen to me! I killed them, I killed them all. The sirens, they're gone! Well, I'm not so sure about Canosa, but...but even if she made it, I don't think she'll bother us anymore. She won't dare. You should've seen her fly, it was epic. We didn't die, you hear me? We can live, we can run away, we can..." I grope for the next thing we can do, thinking that in some perverted sense it's great that he's deaf, because maybe, just maybe, it will prevent him from reacting to my siren voice and we actually will have a chance of creating a future together.

Hunter shakes his head no. It makes me angry.

I shout obscenities at him, wave my arms for added effect, but all I see in response is pain flitting across his face, and I know I went a little too far.

"You can't be deaf!" I yell at the end of my tirade, and break down crying. Hunter reaches out to for my cheek, smearing tears off my face. I grasp his hand and kiss his grimy fingers, one by one.

"I'm sorry. Sorry. I didn't mean it like that...it's just...I was...I'm overwhelmed with all of this shit, okay? It's getting under my skin and it's a little too much. I want to forget about everything that happened and run away, hide some place quiet, you know. Together..." I trail off, not sure what else to say, ignoring the futility of it, which Hunter confirms.

"I...can't...hear...you." He spells out each word carefully, moving his lips in an exaggerated fashion, and gradually the meaning sinks in. "I...can't...hear...myself...talk," he insists.

"You can't hear me?" I repeat idiotically.

He reads off my lips and nods, wiping hair off his forehead and leaving a dirty streak. He props himself up on his healthy arm, and I help him sit up. We stare at each other, into each other.

The rain patter turns into a gushing stream, heavy, washing our faces and our minds. Dusk prances around in rivulets of violet haze.

"Did I blow your eardrums? I did, didn't I," I say quietly. I cover my mouth with one hand, horrified, holding his hand in the other.

A small indentation in the ground between us fills up with muddy fluid and turns into a puddle. I watch drops splatter on its surface, and hear them make teeny plopping sounds.

I raise my eyes. Hunter looks at me without any expression. I want to cry again. The moment is ripe to feel tears rolling down my cheeks instead of raindrops, but they won't come. My tear ducts are as dry as bone. The sky cries for me, rain dripping down my face and soaking my tattered sweatshirt.

"Oh, God. What did I do. What did I do," I mumble into my hand, numb and unmoving.

Hunter screws his face in concentration, slides his hand out of my grip, and taps me on the shoulder. Then, stumbling over each word and stopping to make sure I understand him, he begins to talk, slowly.

"Ailen. I didn't ask you to save me. The deal was to die together. But you're a stubborn turkey, eh? You always do things your way. Well, it's my life and it's up to me what I do with it. I decided to call it quits a long time ago. I planned for it, carefully, in case you didn't know. Now I'm alive and deaf. Crippled. You know how weird it feels talking and not hearing yourself? It's not just weird, it's scary. I don't want to carry this pain around for the rest of my life. If you can call it life," he sighs, visibly exhausted by his effort.

I open my mouth. He shakes his head. I close it, biting my tongue.

Hunter continues. "We were supposed to exit life, spectacularly, once and for all. I thought falling down over five hundred feet would do it. I shouldn't have dragged you with me. I should've done it alone."

He holds back tears. I swallow, taking his hand and studying his palm; I bend his fingers and inspect the grime under his nails, black and sticky.

"Shoulda-woulda-coulda. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. You know who I am right now?" he asks, the tone of his voice bordering on annoyance.

I shake my head, scared to look up.

"A disabled teenager with a single parent who's dying of cancer. Hunter Crossby, nice to meet you." He shifts from talking to nearly yelling, which sounds even scarier because he fails to pronounce the words clearly and they sound like a broken string of vowels and consonants.

"A siren hunter who can't hear. What a joke. I don't know what else to do. This is all I know. It's what your father taught me to do. To hell with sonic guns and whips, why bother. You exploded them with your voice, just like that. What's the need for me after this? Nice job, Ailen. Go brag to your papa." He yanks his hand out of my grip.

He never ever used to call my father Papa. Not once. His words hurt. I look up and slowly stand.

His face is livid with anger, and he glares me down.

"Remember how I asked you if you ever wanted to kill yourself?" I say. "Well, have you ever felt like death is not enough, like the mere fact of your existence poisons everything around you, ruins everyone you touch? It's like in that legend about King Midas. He asked Dionysus, the Greek god of grape harvest, to grant him a special wish. To turn anything he touched into gold. You know what happened to him? He died of hunger. Know why? Because the food he touched turned to gold. Even his daughter turned to gold when he wanted to hug her. I'm like that Midas guy, except everything I touch turns to dust." I suppress the oncoming tears and fall quiet.

Hunter looks at me, but from the expression on his face, I can see that he didn't hear a word I just said.

Rain splatters over the fallen tree trunk. The brook warbles and rolls and gurgles. The air turns dark and impatient.

Hunter starts to shiver. I keep forgetting that it's me who feels good under the rain, not him.

I hear his soul, clasp at its tune as if I'm drowning. Yet, somehow, it doesn't sound like home to me anymore, doesn't sound like anything at all. It's just a melody empty of meaning.

Hunter opens and closes his mouth like a fish out of water, but no words come out. He averts his eyes and looks into the darkening distance, not seeming to see anything at all with his gaze empty.

"It hurts, you know, not being able to hear you," he finally says in a small voice, as if his whole body shrunk. "I love listening to your voice. Loved it." He's in pain, I can feel it, and I automatically squat next to him, to comfort him. He shrugs away and I freeze, my arm raised. I slowly lower it and hug myself, tight.

"I want to die. Can you please leave me alone? Leave me."

I can't believe what I'm hearing. I want to reach out to him, to stroke his hair, to kiss his face, to hold him. My arms stay firmly crossed over each other.

"Your father was right, you know." He slurs his words, but the undertone of bitterness is unmistakable. "Sirens poison our very spirit. They do it sweetly, quietly, with a hundred percent rate of success." He turns his head to look at me.

"Why can't I simply quit you? Why? Can you please get out of my life, please? Can you simply leave me alone? It's all I'm asking." I sense an urge to hurt me in his eyes, a childish wish to strike out just because. Just because it will make him feel better. So I take this virtual blow and nod. I wanted to prevent him from falling in love with me again after all, didn't I? Looks like I succeeded. I know it's time to let him go, but I can't move.

"Fine. If you won't go, I will," Hunter says.

He turns his back on me, pulls up his legs, and awkwardly pushes himself up, using his only healthy arm, moaning in pain and slipping in dirt. I stretch out my arms to help, but then drop them, knowing he won't accept it. He stumbles forward a good ten feet before looking back. I never saw his eyes that cold.

"I don't ever want to see you again, you hear me?" His voice catches at the end. "Never." And then, after a pause, "I can't even tell if you heard me or not." He turns away and stumbles forward.

"Mission accomplished," I whisper. I want to beg him not to leave me, I want to scream and yell and thrash, but my muscles atrophy. One phrase echoes against the walls of my empty core, He left me, he left me. I need to stop sulking and accept it. But I can't help myself and lose it completely.

I wail. I pour my grief into an odious animalistic howl that has no words, only pain. Its voluble garble disburses across the valley in loud echoes, and I howl harder, convinced that Hunter won't hear me anyway. I lose myself in my anguish, screaming freely, at the top of my lungs. What I fail to take into account is the effect my voice has on the elements, water in particular. By the time I figure out what's happening, it can't be reversed.

Called on by my incessant misery, liquid seeps out of the ground and pools into puddles; puddles overflow, forming rills that quickly join with the flowing river about thirty feet away. It spills over its rims and rises a foot, swallows the banks, rapidly covering dirt with mangy streams. I abruptly stop wailing and jump up, watching with horror as the surrounding mud turns into a pond filled with broken tree limbs and tawny fluid.

There is a sucking sound from the ground itself, as if it's a gigantic sponge that some ancient, monstrous hand squeezed. At once, water surrounds me, rising rapidly from my knees to my waist to my shoulders. The rumble is overpowering.

"Hunter!" I yell, thrashing about in the muddy liquid of my own creation.

Hunter is about ten yards away, clutching the Douglas fir trunk, bobbing in this watery madness. He struggles to pull himself over with one arm, to saddle on top of it.

I want to help him but his request to get out of his life holds me back. Now is the perfect time to let go and die for real. Now there is truly nothing else left to live for. Nothing at all.

This knowledge makes me calm and I know what to do.

Water comes out from all surfaces at once, covering my shoulders, gurgling, filling up the basin between the mountain ridges, turning the valley into a gigantic bathtub filled with liquid mud, with my pain, with Hunter's pain, with my father's pain, with my mother's pain. Even with Canosa's pain and the pain of the sirens. It soaks it all up, the brown mess of life that stinks, that's hard to face, that we shove into the backs of our minds hoping it will vanish.

Hunter shouts something at me, pointing into the distance and then back at me. I can't hear him; I'm floating, giving in to my exhaustion from fighting.

Clouds give way to a clear lavender sky. Mount Rainier looms its white splendor over everything. I watch as rapid fluid darts down its slope at maybe fifty miles per hour. A loud rumble fills the air, announcing melted snow mixed with soil and other forest debris. It sounds almost like a musical mudflow, with me directing its performance. Except, at this point, I'm not doing anything anymore, I shifted something and set it in motion with my wailing, the glorious vocalist of erosion. Mount Rainier National Park is my conductor stand, and my voice acted as a maestro's baton.

I watch the catastrophe unfold with insane glee, my feet barely touching the ground underneath the murk. The noise of the rushing water is deafening, but it appears that the worst of it is over. It's gradually quieting down.

Something bumps into me and kicks me out of my delusion. It's a tree trunk. Uprooted firs fight for space, their branches overlapping each other. Several yards away, dunking in and out of the water, Hunter clutches a floating Douglas for dear life. He frantically motions at me. I can't make up my mind if it's safe to swim to him and help, when a distinct rhythmical plopping enters my range of hearing.

An elongated object bobs on the surface about a mile away. It's hollow. I concentrate on it, trying to discern the exact shape by the sound and why it attracted me in the first place.

Then I know why. It's a boat. A rowboat. It slips across the surface of the liquid mud. It's empty; at least I hope it is. I can't discern a human soul within it. It must be someone's boat from a nearby campground, because where else would an empty boat come from? Perfect. The least I can do it guide it here and let it be Hunter's ride, if he decides he still wants to live. It's better than having him hang off a tree trunk.

I hum, creating an undercurrent, thinking that once Hunter spots the boat and makes his way into it, which I'm sure he will, I can secretly hum him back to civilization and maybe he'll change his mind about dying.

Elated by this prospect, I float, closing my eyes as I concentrate on humming. I open my eyes. Night is approaching fast. The boat appears in the distance, no more than a dark dot gliding through evening mist.

"It's for you, Hunter, just so you know that I love you," I whisper, and hum some more.

Hunter doesn't even look at me. I don't blame him. There is nothing to look at; I'm a cold, undead girl submerged to her neck in thick brown soup.

You're a monster, remember that. Won't you ever forget your place?

Another minute goes by. The boat is now about fifty feet away, and Hunter notices it too. It looks empty, two oars trailing on each side, their handles sticking out of the rusty oarlocks, screeching. Its hull was once painted bright blue, now it's faded into an unidentifiable shade of ultramarine. I close my eyes once more, willing it to move, tugging at it with my voice, wanting it to glide closer. It bobs on the waves, its weight disproportionate with the shape and size of its wooden body, submerged too deeply in the thick gumbo of dirt that I conjured.

I open my eyes to see what's wrong and float very still.

The boat is ten feet away from me, and about ten feet away from Hunter, dead in the middle between us. What I took for silence is not silence at all. I hear it now. The familiar flap of butterfly wings, the broken flute. My father sits up in the boat, his face pale yet smug and satisfied.