Dark Tales Short Story Competition - Winner

They weren’t like me. They sat in the cafeteria, with its echoing walls and its endless clashing of trays and knives and glasses, and they talked. They laughed and cried, accused and fought, and fell off their chairs with shrieks and guffaws. It seemed to me that all that other people did was talk. But not to me. Because I never talked back.
“Oh look. It’s that weirdo with the jar.”
Two girls passed me by, and I thought I knew one of them from my combined science group, but it was her friend who’d spoken. She flicked her ponytail about as she snapped her gaze down to where I sat, and locked her dark eyes onto me.
“Can you hear me, weirdo? Or are you deaf as well as dumb?”
I clutched my jar tighter, and kept my head down. Those screwed up eyes bored into my hair, but I felt the heat of their gaze shift as the shadows of the girls swished away.
“Lol. What a freak.”
I had long since stopped trying to reply, even in my own way. What was the use of trying to form words which I had never possessed the right mechanics to say? To make those weird, guttural noises that sometimes came out by accident, but never really meant anything? I don’t speak. I just make noises. No matter how many words are thundering around in my head, none of them have ever made it out. And that’s not just when the bullies close in. Even the people who have tried to be my friend have given up. I guess they were supportive at first. They understood that I couldn’t speak, so they asked me to write.
“Write it down.” They said. “We’ll wait.” They said.
But you soon fall behind when you can only speak as fast as you write. In any kind of group, I was always too slow to answer, and even one on one, people started looking at their phones and carrying on other conversations whilst they waited. They might have let me speak, but they didn’t really listen.
That’s how I became the weirdo with the jar.
When the two girls had walked well out of sight, I took the jar off my lap and set it on the table. Its insides rustled, the different types of paper with their ragged, ripped edges rubbing against one another behind the glass. I unscrewed the lid slowly and set it down, the rest of the world a blur in the corners of my vision. But the blurs didn’t come too close, so it looked like I was safe to proceed. I fumbled in my bag for one of my schoolbooks, and tore a strip of writing paper from its innards. I licked my lips, lungs expanding, and I spoke into the page with the stroke of my pen.
I’m not deaf. I heard you. And I wish you couldn’t speak either.
I rolled up the torn-off strip like a little scroll, and placed it with the many others in my jar. When I sealed the lid, the sharpness in my gut began to fade. I had her now, like so many voices that had come to me with their barbs and jeers. Every answer to every insult I’ve ever had. Every moment of malice and pain. Every ill wish. Every wicked thought that that kind of anger and embarrassment brings to me. I put them in the jar, and then the pain goes away.
It was Edith’s idea to make the jar. She lived on my street. Literally lived on it. She had a pile of coats and a dirty brown duvet, and a duffle bag with everything else that she owned in the world bursting from its seams. I guess she wasn’t the kind of person I would have talked to if I could talk, but she talked to me, and I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t tell her to get lost or move along, or that she stank of fish guts, like the other kids at my school would have. And once I’d let her talk to me for a few weeks, I didn’t want to tell her to go anymore. She was the only one who could see the pain I was always in: trapped every day by my own silence.
“Keep your pain in a jar, Sweet One.”
She always called me Sweet One, for my lack of a name in our one-sided conversations.
“People have been doing it for centuries. Messages in glass bottles. Witch bottles. Spells. Cries for help. It’s all the same thing.”
There were so many questions I wanted to ask Edith about the stories she told me. Like the legends of the witch bottles, and the poor people who used them to try to ward off evil. My jar kept me sane, at least, and I guessed that was a similar thing. But as I looked at it, sitting there on the cafeteria table, I noticed that the jar was getting full. It had been a whole term at school since Edith handed the dirty old jar to me, and told me to fill it up with my pain. I wanted to ask her what I was supposed to do with it when it was chock full of my voice and my feelings.
But I never had the chance. Lost in memories, I’d forgotten to keep watch for trouble. A sudden arm swooped in from behind me, and I watched with a silent, open mouth as my jar was lifted clean into the air. I leapt from my seat and spun, trying to reach for it, but the hands were too fast. The figure who had it had already launched himself onto the next table, standing with both arms raised to the huge, echoing ceiling. His grin was wide and toothy as he shook my papers, my feelings, my soul, between his stupid meaty paws.
“Is this the thing you meant, Mina?”
He was speaking to another figure behind me, and I spun again to find her as she answered.
“Yeah, Kush. The weirdo’s writing stuff about us. I know it.”
It was the ponytail girl again, back for a second helping. And I knew the boy they called Kush all too well. He’d pushed me over in the hallway plenty of times, and slammed into my bag so that I’d dropped all my books just as the bell rung to go into class. He pulled my seat out from under me once, and I landed so hard I had to see a doctor. Kush was in my jar thirty times over.
“Well it’s time we put a stop to all this.” Kush’s eyes glittered over my precious capsule. “Permanently.”
He unscrewed the jar, and for one horrible moment I thought he was going to start reading stuff out. I banged my fists hard on the table and tried to reach for his legs, but Mina snatched me back and gripped my arm so tight that her nails dug in. Kush looked down, a brow quirked.
“Go ahead, weirdo. Scream. Cry out. Tell me to stop and I will.”
The other kids laughed. They laughed and laughed because they weren’t like me. They could make any word or sound they wanted. Any one of them could have told him to stop, but no protests came. They were all in on my suffering. I struggled hard against Mina’s nails as Kush took a lighter from his pocket and clicked its flame into being. He dipped it into the jar, onto the topmost paper, and the whole thing caught fire. Slow, black curls of burning embers mixed with bright orange flames as the jar began to sizzle.
It was glowing and too hot to hold within seconds. As Kush set it down, he stumbled on the table, struggling to stay on his feet. He rubbed at his neck, and then his legs, and then his hands came back to find his throat. Eyes wide and bulging, he let out a colossal wheeze, spluttering into the rising plume of smoke. Kush’s face was as red as the trays in the cafeteria, and he clasped his voice box as he took in bigger and bigger gasps. He lunged forward and crashed off the table to my feet.
Mina let me go. She was the next to fall, her face bright and clammy. She clawed at herself like a girl gone mad, shaking her head. But she couldn’t cough or cry. When she opened her mouth, she made no sound at all. I looked at the burning jar, and then beyond it, to the kids who were dropping left, right and centre in the huge space around me. They had lost their voices too, just as I had wished. Everyone here had teased me at some point, and now everyone in my pain jar had what was coming to them. They were burning for it.
There came a tapping sound, echoing over the eerie silence of bodies falling and writhing. For one crazy moment, I thought it was the glass of the pain jar, but when I glanced out through the smoke, I saw a hand pressed to the cafeteria windowpane. Edith’s bony face peered in, but she wasn’t dressed in rags or carrying her duffel bag anymore. Her hair was wild and blazing with life, as jet black as the soot forming at the foot of the fire in my jar. She gave me a grin, and I saw the same flames burning in her eyes.
And I understood then, what I was supposed to do with that jar. I let it burn. Because nobody in that room had used their voice to stop the fire. Nobody there had understood the pain they’d caused me, until now. They weren’t like me. And now, they never would be.