The first time I felt him stir, it was like a fish bone lodged sideways, a persistent prickle of wrongness. I coughed, drank water, swallowed a heel of bread. Nothing. The sensation remained. A week later, he cleared his throat. It was a guttural, rattling sound, like gravel in a coffee grinder, and it vibrated up my jaw. I nearly crashed my car.
His name, I learned, was Arthur. He didn’t introduce himself so much as begin a running commentary on my life.
“Hmph. Another Tuesday,” he rasped as I brushed my teeth, the sound a low thrum against my larynx. “And you’re wearing the gray sweater again. A veritable explosion of personality, you are.”
I was a librarian’s assistant. My life was quiet stacks and the gentle rustle of turning pages. I liked the gray sweater. Arthur did not. He was, for lack of a better term, an old man living in my throat. My doctor said it was globus sensation, a psychosomatic response to anxiety. He prescribed pills that did nothing but make Arthur complain about the “chalky aftertaste.” The doctor was, in his own gentle way, gaslighting me into believing my own body was a liar.
My life continued, now with a crotchety, invisible roommate. At work, I practiced what my younger colleagues called ‘quiet quitting’—doing the bare minimum, my passion long since eroded by budget cuts and bureaucratic nonsense. Arthur hated it. “In my day, we had pride in our work,” he’d grumble, causing me to wince and clutch my neck. “This is just… managed apathy. Pathetic.”
My only escape was Lyra. She was a potter I’d met at a weekend market. She had clay under her fingernails and eyes the color of a stormy sea. She radiated a kind of effortless ‘main character energy’ that I could only watch from the wings. On our first date, as I fumbled for a topic of conversation, Arthur offered some helpful advice.
“Ask her about her dowry,” he wheezed. I choked on my water.
“Are you okay?” Lyra asked, her brow furrowed with concern.
“Fine,” I croaked, glaring at my own Adam’s apple in the reflection of the restaurant window. “Swallowed wrong.”
“Tell her you find her features comely!” Arthur insisted. “A bit of old-world rizz, my boy! Works every time.”
I ignored him, my face burning. I liked Lyra. I liked her so much it physically hurt, a separate ache from the one Arthur perpetually caused. We fell into a comfortable, undefined rhythm—coffee, long walks, late-night talks. It was a classic situationship, a term Lyra used with an ironic smile that I found devastatingly charming. Arthur called it “dithering.”
“Either court the girl or let her go,” he’d rasp while I was trying to sleep. “This meandering is an affront to romance.”
One evening, I was at Lyra’s studio, a beautiful, chaotic mess of clay dust and drying pots. She was spinning a vase, her hands steady and sure. I was telling her about my boss, Mr. Abernathy, who had once again taken credit for a cataloging system I’d spent months developing. I spoke in my usual muted tones, hedging every statement with “I guess” and “it’s not a big deal, but…”
“That’s infuriating, Eli,” Lyra said, not looking up from her wheel. “You should say something.”
“What’s the point?” I mumbled.
And then, Arthur, who had been quiet all evening, growled. It was a low, volcanic rumble I’d never felt before. “The point,” he rasped, his voice raw with an ancient fury, “is that a man’s work is his own. The point is dignity.”
My throat felt tight, hot. The words weren’t just in my head; they were on the tip of my tongue, bubbling up like lava.
The next day, Abernathy summoned me to his office to praise the “team effort” on the new system in front of the head librarian. I stood there, a ghost in a gray sweater, nodding along. My heart hammered. My throat felt impossibly full, as if Arthur were physically trying to climb out.
“So, a round of applause for Mr. Abernathy’s leadership,” the head librarian said.
And I broke.
Or rather, we broke.
A sound tore from my throat that was not my own. It was a roar, a bellow, a cacophony of my own timid tenor and Arthur’s dusty baritone, blended into something new and terrible and powerful.
“HIS LEADERSHIP?” the voice boomed, shaking the glass paperweights on the desk. Heads snapped in my direction. Abernathy went pale. “He led himself to my desk to steal my work! This system is mine. I designed it. I implemented it. His only contribution was the stain he left on the print-out!”
The voice was mine, but it carried the weight of Arthur’s seventy-odd years of accumulated indignation. It was the voice of a man who had worked in steel mills and fought in forgotten skirmishes. It was the voice of a man who would not be ignored.
Silence. Utter, profound silence. Then, I turned, and with a composure that felt utterly alien, I walked out. Of the office, of the library, of that whole gray life.
Outside, the air was cold and sharp. My throat ached, but it was a good ache. The kind of ache you get after shouting with joy. I walked all the way to Lyra’s studio.
She was there, glazing a row of mugs. She looked up, and a slow smile spread across her face. “You did it, didn’t you?”
I nodded, my throat too raw to speak.
“Good,” she said simply, and went back to her work.
That night, lying in the dark, I felt a familiar, gentle rumble in my chest. It wasn’t angry or insistent. It felt more like a cat’s purr. A quiet hum of satisfaction.
“Hmph,” Arthur murmured, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it. “Decent work, son.”
I took a deep breath. The lump in my throat was still there. But it no longer felt like a fish bone or a disease. It felt solid. It felt like a stone. A foundation. I cleared my throat, and for the first time, the sound that came out was entirely my own, yet deeper and more resonant than it had ever been before.
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