The Thief

Jerry saw it for the first time in many years at his late mother’s house. The thieving thing! He clicked it on. It squeaked at first; then it briefly sounded like it was laughing at him.

He knelt before it and faintly heard his and the gang’s prepubescent voices from long-ago summers: “Go ahead,” “It won’t hurt you,” “Your voice sounds funny,” “Do it again,” “Jerry, you’re a riot.”

With one hand, he covered his stoma to speak… the only way he could since the cancer surgery that took his larynx. With the other, he grabbed a leg of the metal thing and angrily shook it. “Give it back!” he demanded as loudly as he could. After another chuckle, its control box briefly smoked, and the dusty blades stopped spinning.

The thing had chosen suicide over giving him back his stolen voice.

He sat in Mother’s favorite chair. Until that moment, he had believed a transfer was somehow possible⁠—that he could retrieve the precious voice he wasted decades ago to speak into that rumbling fan with his pals because it sounded “funny.”

Any remaining hope left him as tears.