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     It came to her first when she was eleven.

     It was a needle, so very very sharp, and yet, endless.

     It was extraordinarily slight, far less than a millimetre in thickness, but, unaccountably indestructible. It was made of metal, reflecting everything in awful white and silver.

     It was a hurtling force, far faster than anything Billie could possibly fathom, and it pound her head, but in a slow everlasting slam- some sounds would stick, long after they had finished in the real world, repercussions of cutlery and bone china, and Bill would take into protracted consideration the more than tangible possibility that they would never ever leave- another piercing high pin taking up residence in her skull.

     She was in a park when it first came to her. Everyday sounds dampened, were taken over. To think of it now, it seemed like a sequence in a film wherein a bomb has just reached its natural conclusion, except, no one was diving for cover. No limbs were misplaced. No buildings knelt under dust. Everyone just carried on. Mothers pushed push chairs. Swings swung. Handfuls of children chased balls and one another. Bill wondered how long it would stay. She listened. Again and again and again. And then for years to follow.

     Very gradually, over time, she had managed to filter it out, to allow her mind to not be utterly consumed by it. This depended on a system of perpetual displacement and denial. It is not me. It is not here. That sound is the television's current, black and white icicles, tickling the atmosphere. That sound is the computer, it is the radio. It is wind, whistling. Perhaps there is something there, but it is not me. It is the bird's screaming for dawn.