She

Hav­ing popped through a for­ward hatch onto the bow of the ship, I imme­di­ately encoun­tered a guard with a .45 strapped to his side, pac­ing back and forth across the deck, obliv­i­ous of the shrill sound that pierced the air like the scream­ing of a woman in dis­tress. “This is ASROC,” I heard my guide say above the ever increas­ing inten­sity of the scream­ing in my ears, “a tor­pedo launcher with nuclear capa­bil­i­ties.…” At that point, I could no longer hear what he was say­ing, as the scream­ing in my ears had drowned out his voice. Obvi­ously dis­tressed, I cupped my hands over my ears to drown out the screaming.

“Are you all right?” inquired my guide.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said as I tried to regain my composure.

But I wasn’t all right, for I def­i­nitely heard what had sounded to me like a woman scream­ing out at the top of her lungs. And I hadn’t just imag­ined it either, because I heard the scream­ing again as I rounded the ASROC launcher, on the heels of my guide, to see one of the ship’s five-​​inch gun mounts. As the scream­ing increased in inten­sity, I felt as if some­one were stand­ing right next to me scream­ing in my ear. And since the oth­ers had not heard it, I reluc­tantly con­cluded the scream­ing had come from within my head, as a prod­uct of my imag­i­na­tion, I sup­posed, even though it had sounded so real to me.

The whole expe­ri­ence left me with more ques­tions than it did answers. Who was this other within me, that she could manip­u­late real­ity in such a man­ner as to get me to hear screams which no one else heard? Why had I been the only one who had heard her screaming?