outside voices

sarah harris wallman

When the house was quiet, Ellie could feel her mind begin to push out shoots and runners. Tendrils.

An afternoon at the ballpark, back in early fall. That screamy dad was in the bleachers, so Ellie set up her camp chair in the clover beyond the outfield fence. The coaches pitched on their knees, hitter after hitter taking their seven swings, most of the contact dribbling foul, the first-base coach patiently directing the kids, all skinny legs and bobble helmets, back to the plate.

          The answer to this tedium, encouraged by the coaches, was a constant chanting by the children in the dugout.

          Raymond is a friend of mine! 

          He can hit it any time!

          There was always that one attention-kid who pushed his voice past the rest, demonically shrill, but he wasn’t Ellie’s, so she tuned him out.
          She can hit it any time!
          Ellie began to enjoy the rhythmic chanting, the lack of action. She felt the Tendrils begin, encouraged by the clear September sunlight. But gradually, she became aware of a thread of chanting trailing a beat behind the main thrust. 
          You can do it! 
          (Do it.)
          Let’s go, Malcolm, let’s go! 
          (Go.) 
          This voice wasn’t the attention-kid. He’d never lagged a beat behind. 
          She detected a note of mockery in it, and what was more, she was almost certain that the voice came not from the dugout but from behind her. From the woods.
          An echo, she told herself.
          Belly itcher, hissed the voice. It wasn’t pure mockery—there was a plaintive note, as if the mockery had been drummed up to hide something earnest. 
          Ellie’s scalp pricked, but she did not turn toward the woods. Her daughter was next at bat. Ellie had no attention she could devote to some other voice. 

The next time, the voice asked for a sandwich. Peanut butter, slivers of banana. 
          Triangles.
          No crust. 
          Okay! she called to the quiet house. It’s ready!
          Her son charged through the kitchen and she caught him in something like a hug, turned him to face the sandwich. 
          We didn’t say we wanted that, he laughed, breaking free.
          Her daughter also denied the sandwich.
          Ellie wasn’t hungry, but she ate the thing she’d made. She resolved to get out more. A date night perhaps. Lipstick. 

In her younger life, the Tendrils were called forth by music or art or the poignant frustration of a stranger trying to cross a city street, but now it was the quiet that brought her out, that set her wondering.

          But you could not trust a domestic quiet the way you could trust Cubism or water lilies. The quiet of children was furtive. Their quiet held something terrible behind its back: a mountain of unspooled toilet paper, the snapped chain of an heirloom locket.

          These days she was the one on the wrong side of the road, the traffic unrelenting.

The babysitter has a black eye. 
          The children ask, of course.
          She says she was attacked by ninjas. She says they’re hurt worse than her. 
          Teasing you, Ellie promises. 
          Mom! We know! But what did happen? Really.
          Soccer practice, I think.
          The children are dubious. They have played soccer. It was boring, but it never hurt. 

The babysitter, whose name is Bliss, came into their lives through her mother, Ellie’s friend from college. Mags: she kept a mouthwash bottle filled with mint schnapps in the communal bathroom. Mags: count on her to loan you a condom from the cookie jar on her windowsill. Mags: with her jaunty-ass name, always bending at the waist to flip some volume into her hair … Mags got pregnant the summer after graduation. An accident, they all assumed, though Mags never said.
          It would’ve been less awkward if she’d said. The secret was a wedge.
          They gave her a baby shower, inappropriately boozy, Mags sitting in the middle with her giant belly while her friends sloshed ever closer to asking who’s the dad? and why the hell are you having it?
          Why is she throwing away her life? They thought they were whispering.
          After Bliss was born, the girlfriends lost touch with Mags for a bit. The occasional girls’ night, but never a meal or an errand, never an offer to babysit. They had no-child policies at their weddings. In Ellie’s wedding photos, Mags’s under-eye circles match the purplish taupe of her bridesmaid gown.  
          But you can reconnect. You always can. And once Ellie and the others had children of their own, Mags was there, well-rested and wise. She was fond of dispensing advice in quantified nuggets:
          I’ve got one word for you: lanolin.
          I’ve got two words: swaddle blanket. 
          Honey, three words: Cry. It. Out.
          Ellie both liked and resented the way Mags could push these problems into little boxes and hand them back tied with a bow. She did want the problems to be smaller, but she also wanted them to get some air. 

Text from Mags: Guess you saw the shiner? 
          Yeah, wow, wasn’t sure you’d want me to ask. How long has it been like that?
          2 weeks.

          Ellie types a series of question marks and exclamation points but deletes them in case they seem too harsh. Clearly this is far too long for a bruise to linger on the face of a healthy girl.

          Seeing doctor tomorrow, Mags answers for her.

          Oh, good. Sure it’s nothing.

Ellie’s fingers itch. She wants to tell the other friends about the bruise, but it seems like the kind of thing you should discuss in person, so you could lower your voice at the appropriate moments. So your eyebrows could intimate the things you dared not say. So that you could feel the electric pulse of their surprise. 
          But it’s always difficult to bring the girlfriends together in a single time and place. They live in all sorts of towns, all over Northern Virginia, one even in Maryland. Work was busy. Traffic was terrible. The daycares all had weird schedules and the husbands were not all fun.

A decade or more ago, Ellie and Mags met up at a playground. Ellie brought a thermos of wine, and Mags was game, though distracted by Bliss’s demand for a lift to the monkey bars, a push on the swings. The girl threw tantrums if you didn’t applaud her every move. 
          Ellie felt their friend Nina had insulted her (in this period Ellie was on high alert for insult, afraid she actually was the way she sometimes acted, afraid that it was not all a dark joke after all), and she wanted to know which side Mags would take. Rather, she hoped that Mags alone among their friends would not counsel forgiveness. She wanted to drink wine and be mad with someone. 
          When at last Mags made her pronouncement (forgiveness after all), Ellie accepted the correction and looked away to hide her furious blush. The child was no longer on the playground.  
          After screaming into the tunnels and the tube slide, they charged the woods, calling her name.
          They found her, thank God, but the minutes were not pleasant. 

Ellie’s children are nine months apart in age. When she tells people this, she hates having to watch their reaction. The little glint in their eyes that says and now I know something about you.

What did the dr say?
          He’s like 80 and a drunk.
          Srsly?
          I’ve always liked him because he thinks everything is normal/nothing ever wrong.
          What did he say this time?
          Probably nothing wrong. Body capable of great self-healing, etc.

Ellie wakes from a kind of daze. The thoughts that await her don’t feel like her own. When was the last time you checked the children? How long were you on the phone? 
          Because she comes from a line of worried women, it is Ellie’s policy to be fine. Still, she checks.  The children are messy but unhurt. More paper towels needed. A new box of Cheerios.

The voice is different from others that have long-established residence in her. For instance, Jack Markham, who used to have the locker below hers. She had to get her books quickly or he’d have his head at her ankles, looking up. 
          He told his friends he’d seen her pubes rioting beyond the elastic of her panties. He joked that they should ask her out.
          She still thinks of Jack when she tugs the hem of her skirt, when she crosses her legs.
          Maybe boys are not that way anymore. She would have to ask the babysitter. 

Ellie wants to cut her hair. The imperative might come from the voice. Or just a necessary ritual of womanhood, signaling the end of fertility. She goes online to look at bobs and lobs. Shags and bangs. The bathroom door opens and a nose tip enters, followed by a pair of green-stained lips. 
          Can we have a sucker?
          Looks like you already did.
          But can we?
          I’m in the bathroom.
          You’ve been in there. Can we make slime?
          At her office, there were never extra voices. Just the copier’s pulsing zhush outside her office door. If it hit a snag, Ellie had a way with it. Push aside the nail-biting intern: Here, let me. So satisfying to splay the machine’s plastic doors, twist its internal knobs, and pull forth the errant paper, crumpled but whole. At work she solved problems. 
          But lately, she’s been working from home.

That winter, the kids mix batches of slime until their hands chap from the Borax. There is so much glue-bonded glitter on every surface that she considers leaving it for future archaeologists. Without access to the basketball hoop or their bikes, the children are loud-loud. Ellie is working from home and the Tendrils have no chance. 
          She passes a clump of slime from hand to hand. They’ve really perfected the recipe: feels wet but peels clean. Smells like an old lady’s laundry.
          Anyway, if she lets the Tendrils form Vines, she’s nervous of what might hide in all that greenery. Her past selves? Not as scary as the corpse of some self she once planned to be. Snow White in a glass coffin, unaware her hair’s gone gray. 
          When she isn’t good company for herself, Ellie texts people who can be relied upon to respond quickly, to go back and forth for a while.  It doesn’t feel like a waste of time. You have to have friends. 

Mags is the most reliable correspondent. Sometimes she even sends voice memos, detailing the most recent teenage moodstorms, the latest unhelpful doctor visit.
          They put her in the MRI machine and I’m the one who freaks out. She stayed perfectly still.

She has these soccer friends, texts Mags. They come over and close the door.

          Experimenting?

          Kids don’t drink or smoke anymore.

          Ellie raises an eyebrow that Mags can’t see: Experimenting???

          They just watch videos on their phones. And then they do the things the videos say. Fill a balloon with shaving cream. Swallow cinnamon. Make a mess. Gag to death. Film your variation and post.

          Ellie has heard about the cinnamon on the news.

          Makeup tutorials, types Mags. They paint each other up but they never go out. Who is it for?

          Each other?
          Someone on the phones. On the internet. 
          She’s always polite at our house. The kids worship her.
          Needs your money. She’s into Korean face creams. 
          Does she think she has wrinkles?! Ellie types more exclamation points than strictly necessary.
          The exchange goes quiet for the day. Mags is distractible.

Ellie is working from home, but moving her project forward requires input from her collaborators, who are probably leaning on their kitchen counters, idly texting their own friends. Ellie individually texts Irina from the college group. And Nina. And Stephanie. 
          She sends one to the whole chain: What do y’all use to take off your makeup?
          The impending-response dots bubble up and die, wordless.

When I was young, my parents took us to their friends’ lake house, somewhere down a highway in Virginia. The house sat on a bluff high above the water, which could only be reached down a pebbly switch-backed path, agony on wet bare feet if you were the kind of kid who wouldn’t let herself pee in the lake. All the children were expected to play together, regardless of age or preference, and to sleep side by side on cots, on the second-floor porch. Meanwhile, the adults settled on the porch directly below, at first only creaking the swing, but gradually forgetting themselves, falling into wine-drunk talk. 
          I could easily pick my parents’ voices from the crowd.
          With Ellie … you call her and she doesn’t answer. Then you find her just staring into the upper left corner of the room. Here they paused, presumably to imitate the abstracted look. No, it’s freaky. Like, where did you go? What are you trying to see?
          Children can go places the rest of us can’t. 
          This seemed unfair. I wasn’t even supposed to leave the sleeping porch to ask for water.
          They went on, all these parents, naming their children’s traits, their flaws.
          This was the moment I realized that my life went on in rooms that I had left. There was the me I knew, the one who listened and spoke and made decisions related to my body, but then there was the me that my parents or friends—anyone who met me!—could animate with their impressions and judgements. If they called her a monster, I couldn’t defend myself.
          So I stepped out of Ellie and leapt off the porch. I flew down the bluff just inches above the vines and undergrowth. I paused only a moment before I plonked into the water. Ellie heard, but told herself she’d heard a turtle.  
          The Ellie I left behind became the girl our parents wanted. Alert. Conscientious. A tonic to teachers and dentists. A life of listening.  
          But nothing got by her.
          Even if she had to lift her feet in the toilet stall to collect the best gossip.
          Did you hear that?
          Did you hear that?
          Girls, she heard it all.  

​

Mags forwards what looks like a round of applause, but it’s actually praying hands, sent by their church’s “prayer warriors.”
          Mags and Bliss go to the auditorium church with music and good lighting, hands-up praying and the chance of emotional release. Ellie had been once, but it embarrassed her. She was more comfortable among the grey Protestants, fretfully mumbling hymns. There was no imperative to join and people didn’t. 
          Now the big church is praying for Bliss. For answers. For healing. For endurance. We lift you up. With so many singing, a song can’t help but be beautiful. The strong voices pull up the weak. 
          The prayer warrior ladies send Mags prayer emojis every time they do their thing, like kill-counts on a fuselage. Just to make sure she knows how much help they’re being. How much help is on the way.

Who are you texting?
          Ellie looks up. Her husband regards her from across the table. To his left, all that remains of the children are sauce tracks on empty plates. One of them didn’t eat the broccoli. 
          Mags, says Ellie. Problems with Bliss.
          The babysitter?
          No, one of the many Blisses we know, sneers the mean version of Ellie, but not aloud.
          The Ellie at the table brightens: We should go out Friday.
          Out? Ooh la la. The husband brightens too. He is one of the fun ones. 
           I’ll ask Mags if Bliss is free. 
          The husband clears the dishes, singing a song about bliss, about a kiss on a list. 
          Under the pretense of confirming the babysitting gig, Mags lies down in the hallway outside Bliss’s room. At the threshold, she parts the thick carpet to let a finger of sound through. The soccer girls have gone home, but someone is still speaking.
          The upstairs carpet at Mags’ house is terribly thick. It had been a Herculean labor to clear it of bile and cinnamon, and up close it still faintly smells.
          More makeup videos, she texts after. Something about bruises. 
          Looking for ways to cover it up, poor thing.
          She doesn’t think I can help her, types Mags, but I’m going to. I will. 
          Maybe when she’s here Friday … Ellie types and deletes. Mags would never go for Ellie counseling Bliss. 
          Mags leaves a voice memo after midnight: New theory. Those soccer bitches are hazing her. If they told her to sit still and be punched she’d do it, I know.
          Ellie promises herself she will be the one who gets to the bottom of this. 

The college-girlfriends’ text chain flairs in the night. What IS this? A photo of a toddler’s rash. Gross, thinks Ellie, but leaves it to Stephanie to answer. Stephanie is a dermatologist. 

So what did I do after I plunked into the lake? Swam across, of course. Did you think I would live among the busted coolers, the earring you lost while you were skiing?
          On the far side of the lake I found the highway, and I walked beside it until I came upon a gas station/bait shop whose biscuit sandwiches tasted of the foil they’d been wrapped in. I flipped the sign on the bathroom door to “out-of-order” and lived there undisturbed for quite some time. When the night clerk dozed off, I would stuff my mouth with metallic-tasting biscuits. I drank lime slush from the spout. 
          When I was tall enough, I simply became the night clerk. 
          My teenage years came sooner than the Pleasing Ellie’s. One night a brooding insomniac mistook my abstracted stare for a subspecies of attention. You get it, he’d say, and I never disagreed. We had sex in his car, wordless but mutually agreed upon, and then the car took me somewhere else. A city. Other lovers. Those who knew me in that city compared me to a cat: a slinky creature whose needs occasionally correspond with yours. You might find me curled on your futon or pressed to your leg. Other times I’d bolt at your touch. Did I miss the Pleasing Ellie, with her blush-colored stationary, her hazy fantasies and orthodontia? You tell me. 

Forget Tendrils, Ellie had not even enough quiet to compose polite emails. Even the yard was overwhelming, for they lived two blocks from a Catholic school at which, apparently, the nuns brought groups of children outside at regular intervals to shriek at the sky.
          At least, she assumed the shrieking came from children. She assumed it was a school.

When Ellie and her husband get home, Bliss is in the kitchen, eating ice cream from a giant bowl. The empty carton perches atop the trash so the lid can’t close.
          From her own babysitting days, Ellie remembers how the parents floated in on a cloud of alcohol fumes and tried to compose their faces.  She won’t do that. In fact, she feels expansive. A cool-aunt figure. 
          The children have been down for an hour, according to Bliss. Her phone lies face-up next to her bowl, and her eyes flick away from it only briefly when she speaks.
          Voices from upstairs: Mom? Mom! MOM!
          I’ll go, says her husband, kissing her close to her mouth. 
          How do you feel about this house? Ellie asks.
          Bliss glances toward Ellie’s purse, from whence payment, but not yet.
          Nice. Bliss shrugs. Big windows.  
          The realtor said it might be haunted, Ellie lies.
          Oh, cool.
          The girl’s tone is impossible to read. Ellie is frantic to reach her. She needs Bliss to know she gets it. She remembers how it feels.
          I feel it most in the pantry. 
          They stand together in the pantry. Their silence has the smell of potatoes in a mesh bag, just beginning to rot. Once, at a really good slumber party, Ellie’s friends lifted a whole girl with only their fingertips. They used a Oujia board and spoke to a child ghost that called itself Me. That feeling seems to lurk nearby; it might approach if she could just keep from needing it to.

          There, says Ellie, did you feel that?

          Bliss tilts her head. This is the closest Ellie has ever been to the bruise. It looks like the corona of a streetlight in the fog. Purple and gold. Ellie’s hand is moving of its own accord, drawn by the bruise. 

          Ellie’s fingers are an inch away when Bliss slaps her hand.
          Don’t! What the fuck?
          I’m sorry.
          Well, don’t. It’s sensitive.
          It seems foolish now, being in the pantry. Eye to eye with all that pasta. Ellie goes to pull the bills from her wallet, and after a moment of swimminess with the math, starts to hand Bliss the money. 
          But she’ll try once more. 
          Do you remember when you were lost?

          Bliss hugs herself and looks around.

          But how can Ellie explain it? One moment Bliss was an annoyance, a hindrance in a happy hour. The next Ellie was screaming her name up a tube slide, and the world could not be put right until the child was found. 
          Honestly, says Bliss, these windows creep me out. Like someone’s watching.
          No one’s watching, Bliss. Trust me. 

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The big windows sold the house. In the daytime you could keep an eye on the kids at the basketball hoop. At night you see only your own rooms, doubled. That’s when I look in. I approach the window as Ellie does. My face is hers but gauzy, permeable. Sometimes she comes so close our noses nearly touch through the glass. We adjust our hair for each other. Purse our lips and pull in our cheeks. I think we are still pretty. I try to think it hard enough that she will hear. 
          Wake up, girl.
          Ellie is white and doesn’t feel comfortable addressing anyone as girl, but I’ve always liked the way the r and l curl your tongue. 
          Who are you trying to please, duckface?

Wake up, Ellie, thinks Ellie. The babysitter is punching herself. 
          The thought comes in the nineteenth minute of a twenty-three minute shower. The Tendrils grow in the shower sometimes, encouraged by silence and steady water and steam. Ellie rolls her wet knuckles along her own cheekbone. Presses down hard. The mark she leaves: a bloodless white, a flare of pink, then back to normal. 
          To raise a bruise you have to pull back and punch. You need momentum and violence and courage. You need to believe your face has it coming.

Ellie would call Mags back, but Mags leaves messages at such weird hours it is as if they don’t occupy the same version of Fairfax County. 
          You’re not going to believe this. The school wants me to come in. They can’t control the rumor mill. Kids are saying Bliss met a guy online. That she’s sleeping with a teacher. That she’s a … prostitute of some kind, like, online or behind the library. And here’s the thing: they WANT to investigate, but FIRST I have to convince them this didn’t happen at home. I have to fucking CLEAR MYSELF and I bet they haven’t even questioned the teacher. 
          I mean, of course it’s not that. Her teachers are all … middle-aged lady denial hair. You know, like when it’s too long and they tell themselves it looks beachy but it’s really just frizz and split ends?
          It’s not that. It’s just..I don’t know what to tell these prayer bitches to even ask for.
          Sorry. I’ve had wine. 
          Ellie listens to the message a second and third time. When was the last time she saw Mags in person? When had they even talked in real time?

How Mags used to look when she’d just flipped her hair! A halo of staticky volume that was not a style so much as a temporary suspension of gravity.
          How she used to smile like a cat waiting for you to ask where your canary is! Waiting with a mouth full of feathers.

Ellie: You okay? You can send Bliss over tonight if it helps at all.
          Morning Mags is all business: Taking her to Steph. 

Mags hasn’t mentioned the bruise on the college-girlfriends’ text chain. Not even when Irina sent the toddler rash pics. But maybe she’s been texting the girlfriends individually, savoring their reactions one at a time, auditioning their advice. 
          Stephanie is a dermatologist.
          But isn’t that more about the surface of the skin? Don’t bruises come from somewhere deeper?
          Mom? Mom! MOM!
          Ellie slaps the phone onto the counter and gets back to the sandwich she’s making. It’s almost time for a conference call, and she still hasn’t set up the corner of the basement to look like the corner of an office. 

From the cold side of the window, I watch her text Steph and text Steph again. She twirls her hair as if Steph can see this faux-casual gesture. Look up, I command, but Ellie looks only at her screen, where Stephanie is not texting back. 
          What did I think, that she would join me? That we would climb the power lines and chomp the wires and rejoice at the benighted town?
          Did I think she would make me a sandwich?
          I am no one she ever intended to be.
          So I go back to the woods, where the other cast-off Ellies wait in the dusk. The Actress. The Intern. The Entrepreneur. We watch from a hillside as a plume of winged prayers erupts from the auditorium church. We lift our fingers so they graze the prayers flying past. I am still until I’m not: a prayer has flown too low and I grasp it. I chomp its leathery wing. 
          We are not the kind of girls anyone is praying for.
          I bury myself in a shallow grave of severed Tendrils.

Stephanie is coming. Even though she must pass through Tyson’s Corner to get to Ellie’s, even as her children weep for a McDonald’s they’ve spotted across six lanes of gridlock. 
          PLEEEEASE! The magic word, supposedly.
          Maybe she won’t have to tell Ellie the whole story. 
          Bliss is not technically a patient. Not even the insurance company will ever know she’d come to Stephanie’s office. 
          No one has to know how Stephanie turned her back on the girl as she unwrapped the little square of alcohol-soaked paper. How she took a deep astringent breath before she crossed the floor in three steps. 
          It’s always fun to tell Ellie things, though. The way she slaps her hand over her own gaping mouth and says noooooo as the truth first hits. This will be fun. Her kids have always played so well with Ellie’s, a game they call Evil Queens. Out past the property line, the grass is tall and dead. Wheat, the children say. We must harvest it to make bread for the Evil Queens. 
          Ellie and Steph will be the Evil Queens. The role is not demanding. Just drink your wine and cackle. 
          I crossed the room in three steps, Stephanie will say. Boom boom boom. I swiped her face. And when I held up the wipe, we could see the makeup on it, purple and gold. On Bliss’s perfect cheek, a stripe of bare skin divided the bruise.
          A stunt like this requires autopsy. They will order pizza. The children will rejoice. The benevolence of Evil Queens. 
          What was she thinking?
          What on earth?

Once upon a time, Bliss lay beneath a loose thatch of sticks and fallen leaves in a hole no one knew was there, a hole that was only as deep as Bliss, and Bliss was not big (though someday she would be). Through the gaps in the sticks she saw the treetops raking the blue-blue sky. It seemed only right that her name filled the air. BLISS! BLISS! For a long time she did not connect the voices with her mother and the thermos lady. At that age, she was built more for awe than for empathy, and that day it was the universe itself that called her name.

Wallman is a fictioneer who was born in Arkansas, grew up in Nashville, got a degree in Charlottesville, VA and another in Pittsburgh. She’s lived in Glastonbury, UK and New York City. Bits of all these places wind up in her fiction and though she loved them all, she now lives in New Haven, CT.  It’s not bad either. She’s only been robbed at gunpoint once. Find out more about her at www.sarahharriswallman.com

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“Outside Voices” won the 2025 StoryBottle Co. Short Story Contest.