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Selena knocked hesitantly at the door to the old house. “He won’t answer,” they had told her. “You have to just go in. It’s part of the process.”
She waited for the door to open anyway. A stray dog watched her from the alley. She didn’t know what street this was. She had followed directions that led her on foot through narrow rundown passages full of broken windows and unpleasant odors to this solitary home near the top of a hill.
She knocked one more time, waited, and considered walking away.
She turned the knob and pushed. “Hello?” She looked in.
He sat there, at the end of the long dim room that seemed to take up most of the small house. He sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, bent forward, looking at her. He was old, with hardly any hair, and an expression that spoke only of age and not emotion. With firm but slow motion, he indicated the chair facing him.
She understood. She was to sit. Selena remembered the promise she had made to herself and entered, setting herself on the chair.
The man spoke: “You have come to unburden yourself.” His voice was weathered like rocks in dry canyons.
She nodded and said meekly, “Yes.”
“You have a secret you have never told anyone. It is a secret you cannot tell anyone, but it imprisons you. It changes everything about your interactions with others. They cannot see it, but you always do. And so you have come to me.”
Selena trembled a bit. “Is it safe with you?”
“All secrets are safe with me.”
Selena was not sure she trusted him. No, that was her fear talking. But if she did not tell someone, she was not sure she could hold things together back home.
“What if it’s silly? Maybe I don’t have to tell it.”
The man watched her closely.
“It isn’t anything,” she said. “Just something small that I never said out loud. Like a grain of sand stuck in an oyster.”
He smiled slowly, a smile that showed he understood more than she said. “The particular words do not matter. The secret is the thing. The thing locked up. Not the words but that they are unspoken. I will keep them. Give me the burden.”
He waited. She waited. She swallowed and imagined herself speaking the words and took and breath and—
The man moved his hand slowly to his ear. “Here,” he said. “Whisper it. So only I can hear.”
Selena stood. The man watched her with dull eyes that never blinked. She stepped closer and he turned his head. She bent down and whispered the words in his ear.
Then she stepped away and waited for his reaction.
“You are free,” he said.
She felt a lightness, a shimmer of sun in her soul. She had spoken the words and he had not judged her. She sat down, flushed, a little weak in the legs. He was staring at her with that same placid, ancient face. How much had he heard in his lifetime? How many secrets lived inside him? Could a man survive with so many words in his soul?
“Can I—do you have a secret? I will take it from you, if you want.” She did not know what she was saying, whether he would be offended, but she had to offer. He had done her a great service; he had unchained a part of her.
At her words, the man’s face grew sad. “If you had asked before you spoke your secret, then…. But it is too late now. That is how the exchange must work.”
“But why? I don’t understand.”
“You do not need to. Go in peace.”
He stood and walked into the back room. Selena made her way to the entrance. Beside the door was a small donation box. She pushed a few bills into it and entered into sun, where the streets looked less foreboding than before and she walked briskly, with a sense of hope she had forgotten.
Inside, the man sat on the edge of his bed and pondered his own secret, long kept, that while he read lips well, he had been deaf for many, many years.