Descendant of shapeshifting wolves tied to the full moon, created out of the result of a massacre during 1906 Brownsville Atlanta, Georgia, Kareem Johnson Jr. is left out on the ends after most of his pack have already imprinted. One night, as he wa...
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𝐏𝐄𝐎𝐏𝐋𝐄 𝐎𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐍 𝐖𝐎𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑 𝐇𝐎𝐖 Deaf individuals navigate the world without sound. How do you listen to music? How do you communicate with the hearing world if you can't hear yourself? Can you read my lips from across the room? Are you faking your deafness if you speak? If you heard me before, why can't you hear me now? Do you moan when you fuck? If I touch between your legs, what sound would you make?
Alyina understood their curiosity about her deafness. But why the fuck does it matter? It's my ears that don't work, not my brain, she thought to herself often but still gave a proper answer in return. There were those with genuine interest, and those trying to be funny.
What's it like being Deaf? Was a popular question.
It's like standing in a well-lit room. Picture lights as sound, a distraction. Bright and hard to focus on one thing at a time when light is bouncing off many intriguing objects. But when the lights are off, darkness was silence. No distractions. No overstimulation. No sound. Nothing but comforting silence.
Alyina was seven months old when her mother discovered there was something wrong. She naturally assumed her daughter was a quiet baby. Reserved and far too shy to interact with her cousins, but never responded to her name and sudden clanging of objects. Only then would her eyes light up when visual objects were dangling in her face.
Turned out it was genetic. Her father's side of the family had a history of genetic deafness which skipped him and most of his siblings, but didn't skip Alyina. Profoundly deaf in the left ear. Lost about seventy-five percent hearing in the right, bound to worsen as she grows older.
Her family was occasionally involved, father long out of the picture, leaving her mother to raise Alyina on her own. Even if she had to do things differently, her mother was determined she'd grow up like the others and did good at it. And when she turned fifteen, her family saved enough money to cover the cost of her cochlear implant. It was a way for Alyina to meet her family halfway, a cure most assumed because no one cared enough to learn her language besides her mother, Aunt Trisha, and two cousins out of six.
