The words “you were completely flat” echoed in the dead silence of the rehearsal room, a public indictment she delivered with a smirk while our director did absolutely nothing.
For twenty years, that second-row alto seat was my anchor in a world that never stopped shifting.
Then Monica arrived, a soprano with a voice like a wrecking ball and an ego to match.
She dismantled our choir from the inside out, cloaking her power grab in the language of “acoustics” and “optimizing our sound.”
That public humiliation, however, was a declaration of war.
She believed her powerful voice was her greatest weapon, never imagining the quiet alto in the back row was meticulously recording every single one of her flawed notes to compose a symphony of humiliation she would never see coming.
The Gathering Storm: The Soprano’s Shadow
For twenty years, the second row of the alto section was my spot. It wasn’t official, not written down in any church ledger, but it was mine. From that specific seat in the choir loft of St. Jude’s, I’d watched my son, Leo, grow from a squirming toddler in the pews to a lanky college student who only showed up on holidays. From that spot, I’d sung through the raw grief of my divorce and later, the quiet, unexpected joy of meeting David. The worn, burgundy hymnal in the rack in front of me had my thumbprint smudged on the corner of page 214, “Be Thou My Vision.” It was more than a chair; it was an anchor.
Then Monica arrived. She swept into our first September rehearsal like a weather system, all expensive perfume and a voice that was undeniably powerful. She was a soprano, the kind that could shatter glass if she felt like it. During the meet-and-greet, she told us she was a top real estate agent in the city. “I don’t just sell houses,” she’d said with a blindingly white smile, “I sell lifestyles. It’s all about presentation.”
Mr. Abernathy, our choir director for as long as I could remember, was immediately mesmerized. He was a gentle soul, more comfortable with a Bach cantata than with confrontation, and Monica’s confident energy seemed to bowl him over.
By the end of that first rehearsal, she’d already made her first move. “You know, Mr. A,” she said, her voice carrying across the loft, “if we want to achieve a truly blended, professional sound, we should consider optimizing our placement. It’s all about acoustics. Highlighting our strengths.”
She gestured around the loft, her manicured fingers pointing out new positions. The tenors were shuffled. The basses were split. And then her gaze landed on me. “For instance,” she continued, her tone as smooth as honey, “the altos have such a lovely, grounding tone. It would be a shame for it to get lost. Perhaps if we moved some of you back, to create a richer foundation for the sopranos to… soar.”
She wasn’t looking at the other altos. She was looking right at me. Mr. Abernathy, eager to please this dynamic new talent, clapped his hands together. “A splendid idea, Monica! A fresh perspective!” Before I could process it, he was asking me to move. To the back row. My anchor was gone, replaced by a dusty spot against the wall where the music stands were stored. I looked at my old seat, now empty, a perfect space for a soprano’s voice to soar.
Whispers in the Pews
The car ride home was quiet. David, my husband, drove, his hand resting on the center console near mine. He knew the post-rehearsal ritual: I needed a few minutes to let the music settle before I could talk about the day.
“So,” he finally said, turning onto our street. “How was it?”
“We’ve been… rearranged.” I tried to keep my voice light, but it came out flat.
“Rearranged? Like the living room furniture?” He had a dry wit that usually made me smile, but tonight, the joke didn’t land.
“Something like that. A new soprano thinks she knows best.” I explained what happened, the casual way Monica had dismantled twenty years of unspoken tradition in twenty minutes. David listened, his brow furrowed. He was an engineer, a man who believed in logic and proven systems. Monica’s brand of social engineering didn’t compute for him.
“So this new woman, Monica, just walked in and took over?” he asked, pulling into the driveway.
“Not officially. But she has Mr. Abernathy wrapped around her little finger. She talks about ‘acoustics’ and ‘blending,’ but it’s just noise. She wanted the front row.” I sighed, the frustration bubbling up. “She wanted my spot.”
The next week, the division was already visible. Carol, a fellow alto who’d been my row-mate for a decade, shot me sympathetic looks from her new position three feet away. “It’s crazy, Sarah,” she whispered during a break. “She’s got him reorganizing the sheet music library now. Says it’s ‘chronologically inefficient.’” A few of the older members, like Bill from the bass section, just seemed confused, shuffling to their new spots like lost sheep.
But others were captivated. The younger sopranos hung on Monica’s every word, impressed by her powerful voice and her take-charge attitude. They saw her as a mentor, a breath of fresh air. I saw her as an invader, planting her flag in territory that wasn’t hers to claim. She was turning our sanctuary into her stage.
The First Critique
It started small. A little hummed correction here, a pointed look there. During a run-through of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” Monica stopped singing mid-phrase. The rest of us faltered to a stop a few bars later.
“Sorry, Mr. A,” she said, holding up a hand. “I’m just hearing something a little… sharp. In the tenor section.” She smiled sweetly at Mark, a young guy who was still learning to control his vibrato. “Mark, honey, just try to support that note from your diaphragm. You’re pushing it from your throat.”
Mark flushed crimson. Mr. Abernathy, instead of telling Monica that he was the director, simply nodded. “Good note, Monica. Thank you. Mark, let’s take it from the top of the verse.”
I felt a prickle of anger. It wasn’t her place. But no one else said anything. Her critiques became a regular feature of rehearsals. She’d offer unsolicited advice on breathing, on posture, on pronunciation. She cloaked it all in the language of helpfulness, which made it impossible to object to without looking petty or defensive. She was a master of making you feel small while pretending to lift you up.
Then she turned her attention to me. We were working on a delicate piece, a Palestrina motet that required precise, gentle entrances. The altos had a subtle harmony that lay beneath the main soprano melody. It was my favorite kind of singing—not about power, but about presence.
We sang the phrase, and I felt my note land exactly where it should, a soft cushion for the higher voices.
Monica’s head tilted. “You know, Sarah,” she said, her voice just loud enough for everyone to hear. “I think you’re anticipating the beat just a hair. It’s making the whole alto chord feel… heavy. Try to think of it as floating in, not stepping in.” She demonstrated, singing my part with an exaggerated, airy tone that was completely wrong for the style.
My hands clenched the hymnal. She wasn’t just critiquing a note; she was critiquing my musicality, my understanding of the piece. I had sung Palestrina since before Mark the tenor was born. I looked at Mr. Abernathy, expecting him to intervene, to defend the integrity of his section leader.
He just gave a weak smile. “Let’s all try to be mindful of our entrances. From the top.” He wasn’t going to stop her. No one was. I was in the back row, and my voice, it seemed, was getting harder and harder to hear.
A Solo for One
The breaking point, or what I thought was the breaking point, came a week before the annual Harvest Sunday service. The centerpiece was always a beautiful, multi-part arrangement of “For the Beauty of the Earth.” The third verse featured a soaring descant, traditionally sung by the entire soprano section to create a shimmering, ethereal effect. It was the musical equivalent of sunlight breaking through stained glass.
At the end of rehearsal, Monica approached the director’s podium. “Mr. A, I have a thought about the Harvest Sunday anthem,” she began, flipping through her score. “The soprano descant is lovely, of course, but as a group, it can sound a bit… diffuse. What if we highlighted the line? Make it a solo. It would give it more focus, more emotional impact.”
A solo. She wanted to take one of the choir’s most beloved communal moments and make it about one person. About herself.
Carol caught my eye from across the room and gave a slight shake of her head. Bill the bass cleared his throat, about to speak, but Monica pressed on.
“I’d be happy to take it on, of course,” she said with a magnanimous air, as if she were doing us all a massive favor. “I think I can really give it the power it deserves.”
Mr. Abernathy’s face was a mixture of awe and exhaustion. The path of least resistance was right in front of him, gift-wrapped in a confident smile. “Well… that’s an interesting take, Monica. A solo…” He looked out at the rest of us, his gaze pleading for us to understand. “I suppose it could be very moving. Alright. Let’s try it that way.”
The next rehearsal, we practiced it with her as the soloist. We all sang our parts, the familiar, grounding harmonies, and then her voice cut through the air. It was loud, I’ll give her that. She hit every note with the force of a hammer, adding a dramatic, wobbly vibrato at the end of each phrase. All the delicacy, all the shimmering grace of the piece, was gone. She wasn’t singing to God; she was performing for an audience.
I sang my simple alto line, my throat tight with a rage that felt anything but holy. She was tearing apart our music, our traditions, our fellowship, one perfectly-pitched, soul-crushing note at a time. And she was just getting started.
The Unholy Note: The Humiliation
It was a Tuesday night, and the air in the church basement was thick with the smell of old coffee and floor wax. We were rehearsing a new, challenging anthem for the upcoming Christmas season. The harmonies were complex, full of tight intervals and suspensions that required absolute precision. It was the kind of music I loved, the kind that made you listen to your neighbor as much as yourself.
We were navigating a particularly tricky passage where the altos had a rising chromatic line against the sopranos’ sustained high G. It was dissonant and beautiful. We sang through it once, and it was a little shaky. Mr. Abernathy raised his hands to stop us.
But Monica was faster.
“Stop, stop, stop!” she called out, her voice cutting through the fading chords. The entire choir fell silent. Twenty-five pairs of eyes turned to her. She had her gaze fixed on the back row. On me.
“Mr. A, I’m sorry, but we can’t possibly get this right if the foundation is cracked,” she said, her voice dripping with faux concern. “Sarah. That last run. You were completely flat.”
The words hung in the air, echoing in the sudden, dead silence. It wasn’t a quiet suggestion. It wasn’t a helpful note. It was a public indictment. My face burned, a hot, creeping flush that started in my chest and spread to my ears. I’ve been a singer my whole life. I’m not a professional, but I know pitch. I was not flat.
“I think the whole section was just finding its footing, Monica,” Carol said, her voice quiet but firm.
Monica waved a dismissive hand, not even gracing Carol with a look. Her eyes, cold and bright, were still locked on me. “No, it was one voice. It was dragging everyone else down.” She gave a small, tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes. It was a smirk. A victor’s smirk. “Some voices just don’t belong in certain pieces.”
My jaw was so tight I could feel my teeth grinding. The hymnal in my hands felt flimsy, like I could tear it in two. I looked at Mr. Abernathy, waiting for him to step in, to defend me, to restore order. He just looked down at his sheet music, his face pale. He said nothing.
In that moment of his silence, my sanctuary shattered. This wasn’t about music anymore. It wasn’t about a flat note or a cracked foundation. This was a personal attack, a deliberate and public humiliation in the one place I had always felt safe. The rage that had been simmering for weeks erupted. It was no longer a quiet, holy anger. It was hot, personal, and screaming for an outlet. She had declared war, and she had chosen the battlefield.
The Drive Home
I don’t remember singing another note for the rest of rehearsal. My throat was closed, my mind a churning vortex of her words, her smirk, the suffocating silence of the room. I packed my music into my tote bag with shaky hands, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Carol put a hand on my arm. “Are you okay?” she whispered. I just nodded, unable to form words.
David was waiting in the car, listening to a podcast. He took one look at my face as I slid into the passenger seat and turned it off. “Whoa. Bad rehearsal?”
The story came tumbling out, a torrent of angry, fragmented sentences. The accusation. The silence. The smirk. “She said it in front of everyone, David. She just stood there and gutted me.”
He listened, his hands tightening on the steering wheel. He wasn’t a church person, but he understood sanctuary. He knew what choir meant to me. “What did Abernathy do?”
“Nothing,” I spat the word out. “Absolutely nothing. He just let her do it. He let her humiliate me.”
“She’s a bully, Sarah. A classic, garden-variety bully.”
“It’s more than that,” I said, looking out at the passing streetlights, their glow blurring through the unshed tears in my eyes. “She came into my space, my one safe place, and she’s systematically destroying it. She’s poisoning it. For me, for everyone. And for what? So she can be the star?”
We drove the rest of the way in silence, the anger radiating off me in waves. When we got home, I didn’t want a cup of tea or a hug. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to scream. I wanted her to feel even a fraction of the shame and rage that was burning a hole in my chest.
A bully. David was right. And what do you do with a bully? You don’t cower. You don’t let them win. You find their weakness, their vanity, their ego… and you push. Hard. The thought was ugly and vengeful and it felt, in that moment, absolutely righteous.
The Seed of a Plan
The next few days were a blur. I graded essays on *The Scarlet Letter* with a vicious focus, seeing Monica’s face in every judgmental Puritan. At dinner, I’d just push food around my plate, my mind replaying the scene in the choir room on a loop. My anger wasn’t cooling down; it was hardening, crystallizing into something sharp and focused.
On Thursday night, I was sitting at my laptop, preparing a lesson for my senior English class. I was fiddling with the audio settings for a poetry recording I’d made, using the surprisingly high-quality microphone I’d bought during the remote-learning phase of the pandemic. It was a neat little piece of tech, small enough to fit in my pocket, but powerful enough to pick up the smallest sounds with crystal clarity.
I stared at the soundwave on the screen, the visual representation of my own voice. And then, an idea—cold, clear, and vicious—slid into my mind.
Monica’s biggest strength was her volume. Her confidence. But her biggest weakness was her vanity. She genuinely believed she was a gift to our choir. But I had heard what others pretended not to notice. When she pushed for volume, especially on the high notes, her pitch could go wiry and sharp. When she was trying to sound emotive, she’d sometimes scoop up to a note, landing just shy of the center. She wasn’t as perfect as she pretended to be.
What if I had proof?
The thought was exhilarating and terrifying. I could record the rehearsals. I could use my little microphone, slip it into the pocket of my tote bag on the chair next to me. I wouldn’t be doing anything wrong, not really. I would just be… gathering data. Documenting. The initial justification felt clean, almost academic. I would just be collecting evidence of her reign of terror.
But deep down, I knew it was more than that. I wasn’t thinking about showing it to Mr. Abernathy. His weakness had already been proven. This was for me. This was ammunition. I didn’t know yet what the target would be, but I knew, with a certainty that chilled and thrilled me, that I was going to build a weapon.
The First Recording
The following Tuesday, the little black microphone felt like a lead weight in my pocket. I walked into rehearsal, my heart thumping a nervous rhythm against my ribs. I felt like a spy, a saboteur. I gave Monica a brief, tight nod, my face a carefully constructed mask of neutrality, and took my place in the back row.
I placed my tote bag on the empty chair beside me, angling the pocket with the microphone towards the center of the room. I pressed the tiny ‘on’ button through the fabric, a faint click that sounded like a gunshot in my own ears. The small red light blinked once, and then it was live.
Rehearsal began. For the first hour, my anxiety was so high I could barely focus on the music. Every rustle of sheet music, every cough, made me flinch, certain my subterfuge had been discovered.
But then, we started working on the big Christmas anthem again. And Monica, feeling secure in her role as de facto director, began to really let loose. We came to a section with a triumphant crescendo, culminating in a high A that the sopranos had to hold for four full counts.
Monica took a huge, theatrical breath and launched herself at the note. Her voice was loud, yes, but under the pressure, it wavered. It wasn’t a clean, pure tone. It was strained, with a brittle, metallic edge. It was just a tiny bit sharp. From the front row, it probably sounded powerful. But from the back, and to the unforgiving ear of my microphone, it was a flaw. A beautiful, damning flaw.
Later that night, long after David was asleep, I sat in my study with my headphones on, the house silent around me. I isolated the clip. I played it back. Once. Twice. A dozen times.
There it was. The sound of her ego writing a check her talent couldn’t quite cash. A surge of vindictive satisfaction washed over me, so potent it made me dizzy. It felt like justice. But as I saved the file, labeling it ‘Rehearsal 1,’ a small, cold knot of guilt tightened in my stomach. This was her voice, recorded without her knowledge, in a place of worship. The first stone had been cast, and my hands felt filthy.
Composing the Dissonance: The Devil’s Workshop
My study, once a place for grading papers and reading novels, transformed. It became my studio, my war room. Over the next three weeks, I recorded every rehearsal. Each Tuesday, I’d place the bag, press the button, and sing my parts, my mind a split screen between the music in front of me and the secret operation I was running.
At night, I’d put on my headphones and become an audio surgeon. I downloaded a free editing program, Audacity, and taught myself the basics. The screen became a landscape of soundwaves, and I learned to navigate its peaks and valleys. I wasn’t just looking for mistakes anymore; I was hunting for them.
I collected her vocal tics like a deranged hobbyist. There was the way she’d run out of breath at the end of a long phrase, her final note tapering into a weak, airy hiss. There was the high B-flat she consistently sang sharp, a sound like a dentist’s drill. My prize possession was a moment when she’d gotten a frog in her throat mid-solo and produced a sound halfway between a croak and a yelp.
With my mouse, I’d click and drag, snipping these moments out of the larger recording. I’d save each one as a separate file: “Sharp B-flat,” “Breathless,” “Frog Croak.” The act was methodical, meticulous, and deeply absorbing. As I spliced and edited, the faces of the other choir members, Mr. Abernathy’s weary resignation, even David’s cautious concern, all faded away. It was just me and Monica’s voice, stripped of its power, reduced to a collection of its ugliest, most vulnerable components.
A grim sense of power began to build inside me. In the choir room, she could silence me with a look. But in here, with her voice trapped in my computer, I had all the control. I was the director now. I could isolate her, amplify her flaws, and cut away all the artifice until only the raw, imperfect reality remained. The ethical alarms in my head were ringing, but their sound was muffled by the satisfying, rhythmic click of my mouse.
A Crisis of Conscience
One night, I was staring at a particularly cringe-inducing clip—Monica attempting a gospel-style riff that sounded more like a startled goose—when a wave of self-loathing washed over me so intensely I had to push my chair back from the desk.
What was I doing?
I was a high school English teacher. I spent my days teaching teenagers about empathy, about seeing the humanity in characters like Hester Prynne or John Proctor. I encouraged them to look for nuance, to resist black-and-white thinking. And here I was, in the dead of night, behaving like a digital-age version of the mean girls from one of their teen movies, compiling a secret burn book of someone’s flaws.
The church wasn’t just a building; it was a community that had held me together when my life fell apart. The music we made wasn’t just for performance; it was a form of prayer. And I was using it, twisting it into a weapon. The hypocrisy of it all was sickening. My finger hovered over the delete key. I could erase the whole folder, “Monica Project,” and pretend this ugly chapter never happened.
Just then, my son Leo, home from college for the weekend, knocked on the study door. “Hey, Mom. Still up?”
He came in and peered at my screen. “What’s all that?”
I couldn’t tell him the whole truth. “Just… messing around with some audio from choir.”
“Cool.” He slumped into the armchair in the corner. We talked for a bit about his classes, about his friends. Then he asked, “So how’s that new psycho soprano David was telling me about?”
I gave him the abbreviated version of the last few weeks. He listened, his expression hardening. “So she’s a bully. You should report her.”
“It’s not that simple, honey. It’s church. There’s no HR department.”
“Then you gotta fight back,” he said, his youthful sense of justice absolute and uncomplicated. “People like that only stop when someone stands up to them. They count on everyone else being too polite to call them out.”
His words, meant to be supportive, landed with an unsettling weight. He saw it as a simple case of right versus wrong, standing up to a bully. He couldn’t see the tangled ethical knot I was tying myself into. His black-and-white certainty didn’t absolve me; it just made my gray-scaled plan feel even more lonely and sordid. I wanted to delete the files, but his voice echoed in my head: *They count on everyone else being too polite.* After he left, I closed the program, but I didn’t delete the folder.
The Picnic Announcement
The perfect venue presented itself the following Tuesday. At the end of rehearsal, Mr. Abernathy, looking more frazzled than usual, clapped his hands for our attention.
“Folks, just a quick announcement,” he said, reading from a flyer. “The Annual St. Jude’s Fall Picnic is two weeks from Saturday! As always, there will be food, fellowship, and questionable skills on display at the three-legged race.”
A polite chuckle rippled through the choir. My mind, however, was racing. The picnic. It was the church’s biggest social event of the year, outside of Christmas and Easter. The entire congregation would be there, spread out on blankets on the church lawn. It was public. It was celebratory. But it wasn’t the sanctuary. It wasn’t the sacred space of worship.
A crucial distinction. My simmering plan began to take a definite shape. Humiliating her during a service? Unthinkable. That would be a sin against the whole congregation. But at a picnic? A social gathering? The lines felt blurrier, the moral ground softer. It was a loophole I could almost justify.
“We’ll need volunteers, as always,” Mr. Abernathy continued. “Someone to run the games for the kids, someone to manage the potluck table, and someone to handle the music.” He gestured to the large Bluetooth speaker the church owned, which was usually tasked with playing a generic playlist of soft rock and Christian contemporary music. “Just need someone to set it up and press play, really.”
My hand shot up before I had even fully formed the thought. “I can do the music, Mr. A.”
He beamed, relieved to have a volunteer. “Wonderful, Sarah! Thank you. I’ll email you the login for the church’s streaming account.”
Monica, from her perch in the front row, gave me a look. It was a flicker of surprise, maybe even disdain. *The mousy alto from the back row? In charge of the party playlist?* I met her gaze and held it, my expression carefully blank. She had no idea. No one did. The plan was no longer a vague desire for revenge. It now had a date, a time, and a delivery system.
The Final Mix
That weekend, I told David I had a lot of grading to do and locked myself in the study. The time for simple collection was over. It was time for composition.
I opened the “Monica Project” folder and Audacity. I started by creating a new playlist, filling it with the most innocuous, universally-liked picnic music I could find. James Taylor. The Eagles. Some upbeat tracks from Lauren Daigle. It was the sonic equivalent of a potato salad—bland, predictable, and utterly non-threatening.
Then, I began to weave in my secret ingredients. I took the “Sharp B-flat” clip and shortened it to just the piercing, off-key half-second of the note itself. I slipped it into the two-second gap between “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Take It Easy.” It was a sonic splinter, quick and jarring.
I took the “Frog Croak” and placed it at the end of a gentle instrumental piece, making it sound like a bizarre final chord. I took the “Breathless” clip, the sad, wheezing end of a phrase, and layered it faintly under the intro to a peppy Christian rock song, a ghostly gasp of failure.
My masterpiece, however, was the sequence I created from five different clips. I stitched together a series of her worst notes—the sharp, the flat, the strained, the wobbly—into a hideous, four-second-long musical phrase. It was a melody from a nightmare. I placed this abomination right after the chorus of a very popular, uplifting worship song, ensuring maximum cognitive dissonance for the listener.
As I worked, a strange sense of creative fervor took hold. I was no longer just a vengeful alto. I was a producer, a remix artist, a composer of chaos. I adjusted volumes, faded clips in and out, and polished the transitions until they were seamless. The final product was a playlist that would lull the listener into a sense of security before delivering a quick, brutal, and deeply personal audio assault.
I saved the final file, a single MP3, onto a thumb drive. I labeled it “Church Picnic 2023.” I ejected the drive and held the small piece of plastic in my hand. It was an ordinary object, but it felt impossibly heavy, a vessel for all my rage, my hurt, and my now-compromised conscience. The die was cast. There was no turning back now.
The Reckoning: The Day of the Picnic
The Saturday of the picnic arrived with the kind of brilliant, cloudless sky that felt like a divine endorsement. The church lawn was a sea of checkered blankets and folding chairs. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and grilling hot dogs. Children shrieked with laughter as they chased each other, their parents calling out half-hearted warnings. It was a perfect picture of community, of fellowship. And I was about to throw a bomb into the middle of it.
My stomach was a tight, writhing knot of adrenaline and dread. David helped me carry the speaker and set it up on a table near the potluck spread. “You seem tense,” he said, plugging it in for me. His voice was neutral, but his eyes were searching mine. He knew I was up to something, but he hadn’t pressed for details.
“Just want to make sure the music is good,” I lied, my voice sounding thin and reedy to my own ears.
I inserted the thumb drive into the speaker’s USB port. The small screen lit up: “Church Picnic 2023.mp3.” I took a deep breath and pressed play. The gentle, familiar chords of a James Taylor song filled the air. A few people nodded along to the music. It was working. It was background noise, exactly as it should be.
I saw Monica across the lawn. She was holding court, of course, surrounded by a small group of her admirers from the soprano section. She was wearing a crisp white sundress and oversized sunglasses, laughing at something one of them had said, her head thrown back dramatically. She looked radiant, confident, completely untouched by the malice I was harboring just a hundred feet away. Seeing her there, so perfectly in her element, solidified my resolve. My guilt receded, replaced by a cold, sharp anger. She deserved this.
The Performance
For the first twenty minutes, the playlist unfolded innocuously. People mingled, filled their plates with macaroni salad and fried chicken, and chatted over the unobtrusive soundtrack of seventies soft rock. I stood by the table, pretending to arrange napkins, my body rigid with anticipation. My heart hammered against my ribs with every transition between songs.
David brought me a plate of food, but I couldn’t eat. “You really should have a burger,” he said, his gaze lingering on me. “You look pale.”
“I’m fine,” I snapped, then immediately softened my tone. “Sorry. Just… a lot on my mind.”
He nodded slowly, his expression unreadable. He knew. He had to know.
I watched Monica. She was now telling a long, animated story to Pastor John and his wife. She was the center of the circle, gesturing with her hands, her audience captivated. She paused for a moment, waiting for a laugh line to land. The timing was perfect. It was almost poetic.
On the speaker, the final chords of “Take It Easy” were fading out. My whole body tensed. This was it. The first one. The sonic splinter. I held my breath.
The Sound and the Fury
The two seconds of silence between songs stretched into an eternity. And then it came.
*SKREEE.*
The sound was quick, high-pitched, and brutally sharp. It was the isolated half-second of Monica’s failed high B-flat. It wasn’t long enough to be identified as a voice, but it was jarring enough to make several people flinch. A man near the grill looked up at the sky as if a hawk had just shrieked overhead. Pastor John paused, a forkful of baked beans halfway to his mouth.
Monica, mid-story, frowned. She glanced around, annoyed by the interruption. I saw a flicker of confusion on her face before she dismissed it and resumed her story.
I let out a shaky breath. Round one was over.
A few songs later, the instrumental piece finished. It ended with its gentle, fading piano chord, followed immediately by the unmistakable sound of a human throat failing spectacularly: *CROAK-yelp.*
This time, more people noticed. A few kids giggled. Carol, who was setting up the three-legged race nearby, shot me a questioning look. I just shrugged, feigning ignorance. Monica stopped talking completely. Her head whipped around toward the speaker. The smirk was gone, replaced by a look of bewildered suspicion. She knew that sound.
I didn’t have to wait long for the main event. The uplifting worship song began, and a few people started to sing along. The chorus swelled, full of hope and praise. Then it ended. And the nightmare melody I had so carefully constructed erupted from the speaker.
It was four seconds of pure vocal horror. The sharp note, the flat one, the breathless wheeze, the wobbly vibrato, all stitched together into a monstrous cacophony. It was undeniably a human voice. And it was, to anyone who had ever sat in a rehearsal with her, undeniably Monica.
A wave of shocked silence rolled across the lawn. All conversation stopped. The laughing children froze. Every single head turned, first to the speaker, and then, as if pulled by an invisible string, to Monica.
Her face had gone white. Her mouth was slightly open, her oversized sunglasses doing nothing to hide the look of utter, soul-shredding horror in her eyes. The confident, powerful real estate agent, the star soprano, had vanished. In her place was a woman who had just been acoustically stripped naked in front of her entire community. In the dead silence, someone on the far side of the lawn snickered. It was a small sound, but it was enough. The dam broke. A few more nervous giggles erupted. The humiliation was absolute, and it was public.
Sanctuary Lost
Monica stood frozen for another ten seconds, her face a mask of disbelief and shame. Then, without a word, she turned and fled. She didn’t run, but she walked fast, a clumsy, stumbling gait, across the lawn and toward the parking lot. She didn’t look back.
The music had already moved on to the next pleasant, harmless song, but no one was listening. A low murmur spread through the crowd as people started whispering to each other, casting furtive glances at me, then at the empty space where Monica had been standing. Mr. Abernathy was staring at the speaker with a look of profound confusion, as if it had just started spouting heresy.
I had won. My revenge was complete. I had taken her weapon—her own voice—and turned it against her. I had answered her public humiliation with one of my own, magnified a hundredfold. I had imagined this moment for weeks, fantasized about the look on her face, the sweet taste of victory.
But I didn’t feel triumphant. I didn’t feel vindicated. I felt nothing. Just a vast, hollow emptiness where the rage used to be.
David walked over to me. He didn’t look angry, or proud, or disappointed. His face was full of a sad, quiet understanding that was somehow worse than any judgment. “Was it worth it, Sarah?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
I looked out at the scene. The perfect picnic was ruined. The fellowship was broken, replaced by gossip and suspicion. I had taken my pain and used it to create more pain. I had taken the ugliness she had put into the world and I had amplified it, broadcast it for everyone to hear. I had fought the monster, and in the process, I had become something monstrous myself.
The joyful sounds of the picnic felt alien now, the laughter of the children accusatory. I had protected my sanctuary by desecrating it, by bringing the very cruelty I despised right into its heart. I had won the battle, but my prize was this hollow ache, this knowledge that I had betrayed my own conscience, my own community, and the sacred space I had once called home. And that was a dissonance I would have to live with long after the music had faded.
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