Voices

Nights were generally silent. The last sound of the night was the sound of the prison gates shutting down. The collision of concrete and metal would resonate throughout the seemingly empty lobby. And I would try to sleep. The silence would hang over the jail cell, heavy and fragile and then would be popped like a bubble by the clamour of conversations from the other cells. That's when Sen would speak to me.

Her voice, high-pitched like nails on a chalkboard, would try to tell me Let's leave. Let's run away. We can escape this place. Dig a hole. Cut through the windows. Listen to me.

"We should escape," her voice rang in my year. I turned away towards the wall.

"We can't," I tried to rationalise; "We'll be caught."

She brought her lips to my ear and dug her nails into my shoulder. "Don't be a coward. Listen to me."

Poison dripped from her lips with every word she said. She poisoned the silence, she poisoned my sleep. But I needed quiet, I needed sleep. So, I silenced her, and I went to sleep.

The next morning was chaos, it disturbed my sleep and I found myself waking to the gate to my jail cell crashing down. Patches of sunlight from the window barely lit up the cell. The floor was soaking wet, and the guards apprehended me for the oddest reason. Not that I would've been able to tell the floor was wet if they hadn't held me down – I wouldn't know I was being apprehended either, otherwise. I couldn't imagine what I did. Sen was quiet while all of it happened. She just stayed lying there on the ground, head against the wet floor. I couldn't tell why she would stay so quiet. She's always had something to say. Always had something to tell me to do– something that always ended up hurting me.

The clamour through the jail cells grew louder as they took me out of my cell. The inmates' voices from the other cells grew louder. Same conversations and words, said in different tones and sequences.

"Did you hear about it?" 
"Hear about what?"
"She killed it".
"Killed what?"
"That wicked witch" 
"Sen's dead?"
"Sen's dead."

I don't know how Sen could've died when she was in my head. That's what she said to me. She told me she was just a voice in my head. I tried to tell the authorities that but they had already thrown me into detainment. 

"What did I do? I didn't do anything!" I cried out as the guard stared at me in disbelief.

"Make arrangements to send this one to the nuthouse," said one of the guards at the back.

"No, listen to me!" I screamed as the guards closed the gates on my face.

I couldn't kill Sen, how could I kill someone who's not real. I asked repeatedly, only to have my own voice echo back at me. There was silence. I liked silence. I settled down. It was nice there. The silence felt nice but the feeling soon faded with a sound. I heard Sen's voice, again.