Content warnings

Medical imagery. Death. Mental health treatment imagery.

The clinic called the procedure a softening.

Not removal, not erasure—only a gentle sanding of the sharp places. The brochure showed a woman touching a window, sunlight balanced on her palm like a polite animal. I kept thinking about that hand while the nurse drew a blue line along my wrist and asked what I hoped to gain.

“Quiet,” I said.

She wrote clarity.

Afterward they kept me in a pale room with a clock that clicked like it was chewing something small. I waited for the old weather inside me—the sudden storms, the flooding—but nothing arrived. Only a wide, careful sky.

Amir brought soup in a container that still smelled of onions. He set it on the table between us the way people place fragile gifts.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Level,” I said, which was true and not true. I felt like a glass filled exactly to the line where spilling becomes possible.

He nodded too quickly. “That’s good, right?”

I watched the steam make small ghosts above the bowl. “I think so.”

Outside, buses continued their loyal circles. Children continued to be late for things. The world had not signed any agreement to change with me.

I returned to work at the listening room two weeks later.

The place was half café, half museum of sounds: old radios, field recorders, a wall of donated headphones with names taped to them—Mara, Jude, someone who never came back for theirs. People booked booths to hear archives of the city: markets from the 90s, rain on roofs that no longer existed, a ferry horn that had outlived the ferry.

My job was to guide them, to ask what they wanted to hear.

Most people didn’t know. They asked for “something calm” or “something like when I was a kid”. I would hand them the sea at dawn or the inside of a train tunnel and watch their faces loosen.

Before the procedure I used to feel the recordings climb inside me like vines. Now they arrived politely, knocked, left their shoes at the door.

That was the improvement.

Lian came in on a Tuesday carrying a coat too heavy for the weather. She stood at the counter studying the catalog as if it were a menu in a language she half remembered.

“I’m looking for endings,” she said.

“Endings of what?”

“Anything that knows it’s ending.”

There is no official category for that, but I understood. I gave her Booth Three and a set of headphones that used to belong to Mara. The first track was a retirement party where everyone tried not to sound relieved. The second was the last message left on an answering machine before the company stopped supporting them.

When the hour finished she returned with her eyes bright in the careful way people borrow brightness.

“Do you ever feel like the sounds remember more than we do?” she asked.

I told her I wasn’t sure. It was my new answer for many things.

She began to come every week. Always Tuesdays, always asking for material that balanced on the rim of disappearing: a laundromat closing announcement, the final broadcast of a rural station, a voicemail where someone said I’ll call you tomorrow and never did.

We learned each other in fragments. She taught mathematics to adults who were afraid of it. She kept a plant alive that had survived three relationships. She laughed without warning, like a window opening.

I did not tell her about the clinic. People treat such information like a sharp object; they either hide it or hold it too tightly.

One afternoon Amir visited the listening room with sandwiches wrapped in paper that surrendered grease in the shape of continents. He watched Lian leave Booth Three and tilted his head.

“She seems kind.”

“She is,” I said.

He hesitated the way he used to when choosing a record for a party, afraid of ruining the temperature. “Are you—happy?”

The word felt antique. I turned it over.

“I’m steady.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” I agreed, “but it’s nearby.”

He touched the edge of the counter, tracing a scratch someone had made long before us. “You don’t have to be fixed for anyone, you know.”

“I’m not fixed,” I said. “I’m edited.”

He smiled at that, though his eyes did not.

The change revealed itself in small domestic ways.

I no longer cried at advertisements featuring loyal dogs. I could remember the day my mother left without the old heat rising behind my ribs. Even joy arrived with manners, taking a seat rather than climbing onto the table.

At night I dreamed less. Or dreamed and left no evidence.

The clinic called two months later for a survey. I answered their questions while watering the stubborn plant Lian had given me—a cutting from her survivor.

Any side effects?

“Occasional emptiness,” I said.

On a scale of one to ten?

“Five.”

Would you recommend the procedure to others?

I watched water darken the soil. “I don’t know.”

They thanked me for my honesty as if it were a donation.

Lian asked one day if I would choose the recordings for her instead of requesting themes. “Surprise me,” she said. “Something you think I should hear.”

I spent the morning listening through the archive like a diver touching the floor of the sea. I chose three pieces:

1. A man dismantling a piano in his garage, naming each part like a relative.

2. A child counting down to a rocket launch that never happened.

3. The last minutes before a public swimming pool closed forever—echoes of lockers, a whistle, someone dropping a coin that rolled and rolled.

When she finished she sat beside me at the counter.

“That third one,” she said, “I felt like I was the coin.”

I almost told her then—about the sanding, the clinic, the careful sky inside me—but the words arranged themselves like furniture too large for the room.

Instead I asked, “Why endings?”

She considered the question as if it were a small animal that might bite. “Because I’m not good at them. I stay in rooms long after the party. I keep milk past the warning date. I thought maybe I could learn.”

“And are you learning?”

“Slowly.” She looked at me. “Are you?”

The plant between us trembled from the air vent. I said, “I’m trying.”

Autumn arrived without drama. The city practiced its usual forgetting: leaves pretending they had never loved the trees, shops repainting their signs as if that were a second life.

I noticed that customers often cried in Booth Three. Not loudly—just a quiet leaking that required extra tissues. I kept a box there like a lighthouse.

One evening, while closing, I listened to a new donation: a recording from a hospital corridor at dawn. The donor’s note said, my brother breathing after the machines were removed. Please be gentle with it.

The sound was mostly silence wearing a thin coat of air. I felt nothing at first. Then a small ache arrived, surprised to be invited.

It was not the old storm. More like a single drop on a wide pavement. But it was weather, unmistakably.

I met Lian outside the clinic by accident.

She was coming out as I was walking past, the glass doors exhaling their conditioned coolness. For a moment we both pretended the coincidence was ordinary.

“Checkup,” she said quickly. “For sleep.”

I nodded, understanding what she didn’t say. People visit that building for many kinds of hope.

We went to the river and shared bread that tasted of seeds. She told me she was tired of being afraid of her own mind, tired of carrying a suitcase whose contents kept rearranging themselves.

“I just want a little less noise,” she said.

The gulls argued above us like distant relatives.

I thought of the brochure woman and her obedient sunlight. I thought of Amir tracing the scratch on the counter.

“Less noise can be useful,” I said carefully. “But sometimes it takes the music with it.”

She studied my face. “Did it take yours?”

I answered honestly. “Some days.”

She broke the bread into two uneven halves and gave me the larger one, which felt like a decision.

The final Tuesday of the year, Lian asked for a recording I had been saving: the demolition of an old theater where, legend claimed, my grandparents met. The microphones caught the building sighing as if relieved to be done performing.

Halfway through she removed the headphones.

“Do you think places are glad to end?” she asked.

“I think they get tired of pretending to be the same,” I said.

She smiled. “That sounds like a person.”

After closing we walked through streets busy with the business of continuing. At the bus stop she reached into her coat and handed me a small envelope.

“Open it later,” she said.

Inside was a note: Thank you for teaching me how to listen without running away.

No promise attached. Only gratitude standing on its own legs.

I still live in the careful sky. The storms have not returned in their old costumes, and some mornings I am grateful for that. Other mornings I miss the thunder the way people miss difficult relatives—aware of the trouble, loyal anyway.

The plant Lian gave me has begun to split its pot. A white seam runs down the clay like a patient smile. I pretend not to notice, watering around the wound, but growth is never polite about the rooms it outgrows.

Last week a customer donated a tape with no label. When I played it, the headphones filled with the sound of a train crossing a bridge at night—metal talking to metal, the long confident vowel of movement. At the end someone laughed, surprised to be alive inside the noise.

I added it to the catalog under Uncertain Futures.

Tomorrow Lian will come again. I have chosen three recordings for her: a market packing up at dusk, a woman rehearsing a speech she may never give, and the first rain after a long dry month. None of them promise anything. They simply continue.

I am learning that continuation can be a form of courage.

I can still make soup too salty.

I can still love without understanding the measurements.

And when the breeze moves through the rooms of me, I no longer rush to close the windows.

Some endings, I think, are only doors practicing how to open.

END

Carol Mbugua

Carol Mbugua is a fiction writer drawn to luminous, emotionally resonant narratives that explore consciousness, memory, and the unseen architecture of the soul. Her work blends speculative elements with intimate interior landscapes, often centering transformation, awakening, and the quiet power of inner worlds.