When I spoke too loud, my mother would remind me: “In this house, we whisper.” She would put her finger up to her mouth and say it, “in this house - in this house - in this house”. If I was running toy trucks along the ground, yelling out the window, playing telephone with plastic cups and rope, or perfecting my competitive “slam prayers” with my brother, she would say, “in this house, we whisper.” Every time she said it she would become tinier. “In this house, we whisper,” she would say, shrinking to the size of a houseplant . “In this house, we whisper”, she would say, shrinking to the size of a cat. “In this house we whisper”, she said, then shrank to the size of a firefly. She jumped up and crawled into my mouth. She slid down my throat into my larynx. She spelunked around with a search-lamp glued to her head. She found my words, harsh and coarse and mean-spirited, took out a sword and detached the power consonants and the harsh p’s and dicey sibilants from them, then leaped up, grabbed my words by the neck and wrestled them to the ground. She jabbed my words with the sword, deflating them. She picked up the words and slung them across her back like a lion carcass, then climbed up my vocal chord, up my larynx, and crawled out of my mouth, sword in hand, hopping down to the floor. She slinked away in the distance like a beleaguered Joan Of Arc, holding my voice in one hand, dragging the sword in the other hand, walking with her shoulders slightly hunched, a red glint in her eyes as she disappeared in the next room, not looking back to make eye contact, until she disappeared into the air, herself a whisper.
