Creative Writing Workshop: The Listening exercise.

 

A short story/essay based on sensory sounds:

Written By Sara Baloum 

The heartbeat was the first thing that stood out to me, but it was not mine. It pulsed in my ears in sync with the gentle clack of a machine, as if someone were pressing a button from inside my head. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was something I learned to live with.

Outside, the wind howled as if it had a score to settle. Rain slapped against the pavement of my apartment complex, and thunder roared. I stood in the shower, watching the water swirl down the drain. I washed off the residue of something that I couldn’t quite name, maybe it was the world itself.

Somewhere distant, wolves cried out into the mist. The forest was wet with dew, thick with memory. Leaves dripped with stories, and birds whispered gossip from the canopy. But closer, a cat meowed—angrily? Lovingly? I couldn’t tell. The meows multiplied, shifting, merging into a kind of feline chorus until they weren’t meows anymore. Dogs barked. Something primal, like a warning.

Then—rotor blades. A helicopter sliced through the sky, stirring up the old noise. The hum followed, vibrating the walls of my skull. Everything else dimmed. The heartbeat returned, but now it ticked like a clock. As if someone, somewhere, was watching the seconds pass with surgical precision, maybe it was I who awaited something. A large metal door slammed: a cargo opening or closing. A train pulled to a stop. A whistle blew. I was being taken somewhere. Tires screamed, and a voice crackled through static: “White Hyundai, heading—Sirens and urgency but no panic.

As the darkness faded, I found myself in a Shuk—crowded, vibrant, alive. A thousand conversations layered into a single vocal stream. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the world flushed itself away. I found myself in front of a crowd of laughter—the kind you'd hear in a romcom from another decade—bubbled up, disembodied. A baby cried, but there was joy in it, oddly like an echo of innocence from the other side of chaos.

Then: music. A piano. At first, it felt immediate—like I was sitting beside the player, close enough to feel the tension in their shoulders, to hear the weight in each note. But the audio wavered, distorted. It might have been coming from a speaker in the next room, or echoing faintly through apartment walls. Maybe it wasn’t even real—just the memory of music, flickering in my head like a dream I forgot to wake from.

Then came the silence—not absence, but something denser. A quiet that breathed. A presence. Echoes of silence filled the space between sounds, like the air itself was aware. Someone was there, unmoving, simply existing. The kind of stillness that says: I was here. I am still here.

The mechanical heartbeat returned.

Tires screech. Sirens blare. The train returns.

Was this a chase? A memory? A hallucination?

Or was it simply the journey of a pianist, weaving through the chaos of downtown New York, dodging traffic and time, only to arrive at the edge of a stage—where, finally, they let their fingers speak?

And only then did I realize:

The hands were mine.

The music was me.

I had been playing all along.