“She of the echoing voice,

who cannot be silent when others have spoken,

nor learn how to speak first herself.”

~ Ovid, Metamorphoses

On the day Echo broke her vow of silence, it seemed everyone the world over was suddenly plunged underwater. Words lost their resonance and hearing lost its depth, audiences booed and lifelong Catholics, upon hearing the pastor’s muted Mass devoid of its usually glorious pomp, finally accepted doubt into their hearts. In California, a man plugged his surfboard into the sand, put a large pink conch to his ear and heard nothing, while in Arizona, a young boy standing over the Grand Canyon called out his name and heard no refrain. His mother consoled him, convinced it was the easterly clouds that had absorbed his cry, but still the boy shivered.

Far away, Echo made her way down to an old abandoned limestone quarry, blindly fleeing that satyric wind—now insolent, muffling her wake, now a peeping Tom intruder caught leering through the fraying patches of her sunken hollows, and like all voyeurs, it whistled its two-note refrain against the mottled stone and ragweed landscape of the quarry.

Echo clutched to her bits and fragments of words collected over a lifetime spent listening—a Christmas Mass, a castrato’s aria, a snippet of Shakespearean comedy; she was the resonance that sanctified canyons, cathedrals and catacombs, and she was never at a loss for material. She wove her collection into a song, discarding irrelevant words, shaping it into an expression of herself and a memento mori to those fated to hear it.

Some dispossessed spelunker was walking toward her from the south and she carried his footfall’s report cascading along the quarry walls, welcoming his accidental company. She’d been to this quarry before, when its floors still teemed with men, and she had carried the sound of the walls as one day they had come crashing down. She had carried the cries of the men as they fled, and she had muted the cries of those men who did not flee soon enough.

Echo sank deeper into a corner of the cave where the pikes had not struck for many years, followed doggedly by a fly as if the fly wished to say, “You’ve got a way with you.” She slapped the fly aside. “Away with you,” she said in return, for it didn’t tickle so much as an echo of a tickling sensation, and that was all the more irritating.

And then she began to sing. Somewhere between an Irish ballad and a funeral dirge she sang, faintly at first, scarcely a whisper, as if she wasn’t sure her disobedience would even be possible, but then finding her footing, like a mare slipping down a muddy slope finds its purchase she sang, and the bats were raised from their slumber.

“O, she’s a girl with a voice not her own,

Won’t a crier please throw her a bone?

Like a mime with no limbs,

Life’s unspeakably grim,

When the wind’s been your prison and home,

O, the wind is her prison and home.

O, she was once told the true name of God,

She could only respond with a nod,

But listen close and she’ll whisper,

If you concur to kiss her,

Though her face proves immeasurably pale

To see, lest you see like the whale.

O, what her desire has cost!

To sing to the dregs and the dross,

A song without melody,

A laugh without levity,

A love unrequited and lost,

O, a love unrequited and lost.

O, the evening’s now falling like rain,

And Paris is still split by the Seine,

Like her limbs from her voice,

Like her will from a choice,

Never to be heard from again,

O, never to be heard from again.”

When the song finished Echo expected silence, knew the silence to be waiting for her, and welcomed it as the perfect coda to her transgression. The silence would be her applause as it had been since time immemorial—silent cries for encores, silent bravos, silent roses flung from the rafters; but instead silence withheld its ovation, perhaps finding the similes a bit too trite, the melody all too familiar, or maybe preferring instead those harmonies which she had lent to the songs of others, and it whispered its objection refracting along the cavern walls.

Though how could that be? She was Echo after all, and as dubious an honor as that might have been it still carried with it a singularity to be respected. She felt like a gambler having blown her stake; betting too high on a sound she couldn’t carry—her own, so profoundly inadequate—and losing it all, even the ante, even the shirt off her back, even her back, and the skin, and the marrow, and the bone.

Echo knew above all others that only empty spaces could create echoes of lasting clarity, and as she listened to the dissipating echo of her melody, the refracted signifier of her own empty space, more voluminous than any canyon, deeper than any well, an overwhelming sense of her own lacking swept over her. Stripped of her body, her will and her voice, she was finally stripped of all that remained; even the adoptive embrace of space and sound had forsaken her.

But take ease, gentle reader, for it was not in fact her echo that Echo heard, but the lonely spelunker, culled from his wanderlust by the sound of Echo’s song. He went searching for the source of that voice, finally locating it in the deepest and darkest regions of the quarry’s farthest cave; a specter rendered in Impressionistic strokes, pointillistic freckles on the gloaming fleece, and he uttered the faintest of cries upon seeing it (which was, incidentally, what Echo took for her own echo).

And what was it that spelunker saw? Was it really Echo, transformed into substance through song? Or was it just the witching hour and the light, the shadows and the illusory harmonies of Echo’s melody playing tricks with his vision? The spelunker rubbed the apparition from his eyes and switched on his halogen lamp, just in time to catch sight of an equally confused and harried bat, flitting out into the burgeoning dusk.

But all across the quarry space and sound had been transgressed, and when the bat emitted its frequency to gain some perspective of its place in flight, only heard fragments, shrapnel of song, and instead of meeting empty space, the bat met with a limestone quarry wall. Instead of seeing its echo, the bat saw nothing at all.