The Glass House

The Glass House

By Eva May

Curtiss sighed. “Two more years…” he said aloud to himself. While he had no visitors at the moment, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the snitch holes were still on. The doorbell rang.

Two weeks earlier

He was never very good at conversation, and the crime was simple. During a casual talk with his mother, he mentioned a sensitive subject. Although his mother and himself couldn’t care less about it, they happened to be standing too close to a snitch hole, a hidden microphone implanted in the surroundings of places where people are most likely to speak to one another for extended periods of time. Their conversation traveled through the long, skinny wire, and into the snitches’ headquarters. It was a dull room; Curtiss had only been there once, on a Social Graces Academy field trip . It was full of mumbled snippets of eavesdropped conversation and static. From there the snitches broadcasted all of the people’s best conversation to the radios of the upper class. One of the snitches had become offended. After a heart-stopping tone, a dreary feminine voice said over the intercom, “Conversation must be enjoyable and comfortable for all to hear.”.

The present

Curtiss carefully walked to the door. His prison was a translucent, beautiful house, made entirely out of the most delicate, fragile glass. If one touched the walls, the whole thing would shatter and come crashing down on them. This was the punishment for the sole crime in the town; improper conversation. To choose to touch the wall and end it all was a path that most would take eventually, but for the strong of mind or short of sentence it was but a harrowing mind game. He opened the door. A very plump lady wearing a purple cocktail dress, a fascinator, and a heart-shaped locket walked in without being asked.

“I am Madame Perkins,” she said, “pleased to visit your lovely home.” She had the strained, nasal accent that most of the upper-class citizens had. Whether years of the perfect, polite speech that caused them to escalate into wealth or the self-important attitude was what caused it, it was a sure marker of someone difficult to be around. Curtiss sucked in his gut, straightened his posture, and used what he had learned over the past two weeks to safely speak with her. Despite all his attempts to politely usher her out, she persistently continued shooting the breeze. After a few hours, Curtiss’s nerves got short, and his eye began to twitch. The subject of the speech was dull, for it was merely small talk. One can only say “Lovely, you?” so many times, and yet she remained longer.

He presumed it was at least a few days before she said

“Toodle-oo, bye!” and waddled out the door. The longest recorded time for small talk was two months, so he got off easy. People like Madame Perkins’ sole purpose was to torture glass house convicts, trying to cause them to snap, so that their sentence would be lengthened or their wall punched. In that way, society could eliminate poor speakers. No, he had not snapped, although a few times he was tempted to kick the wall, sending shards of glass down on him and his unwelcome visitor. It would be over, and society would have one less dead weight. No, he persevered. “Two more years…" he muttered to himself again. “Then I will be free.” Talking to himself had a sort of therapeutic effect upon him, for the most agreeable person to talk to is, of course, oneself.

One year later

Curtiss saw his reflection for the first time in a week. "I look awful…" he thought. He had just had a very long visit from a pair of elite speakers. All of his torturers had worn suit coats and fancy dresses, and had that horrible, grating accent. One after another, occasionally two at a time, they had tested his patience. Still, he persevered. His own tired, unruly face was a breath of fresh air from the endless parade of waxed mustaches and mile-thick makeup. He was not necessarily a handsome fellow, with a square nose and big, brown eyes behind thick round-framed eyeglasses. His face expressed the level of stress that he had built up in the past year. “Let’s see if we can do anything about those eyebags.” He scrubbed his face with cold water and patted it dry with a towel. He slurped down what seemed like a gallon of water from the sink. All that conversation made his throat sting and his voice raw. "I’m going to take a nap, I deserve it," He thought. Just as he climbed into bed, the doorbell rang. He grumbled a few profanities so quietly that the snitch holes could not detect him, and opened the door. It was a small girl, in the same plain, rough garb that he, his mother, and all the other lower-class citizens wore. Curtiss was relieved. She would likely be as poor a speaker as he, and wouldn’t see him as below her. “P-pardon me, sir,” she began, “W-would you l-like to b-b-buy some chocolates?”

Curtiss gave her a crumpled note and invited her in. They talked for hours, and although she was only about six they had much in common. Overnight, a friendship was formed. She was insightful and witty beyond her years and loved to talk about birds. “Oh, how I wish I was a bird,” she would say, “then I would fly far, far away from this place.”

“You would bring me along, too, wouldn’t you?” said Curtiss.

“Of course I would. I would carry you with me, and we could tell stories and dance around a campfire in the mountains.” Curtiss jumped up.

“And we could talk about dragons and all the horrible people that think that they’re better than us!” he exclaimed.

“And we would all live in a castle by the sea, Just you, your mother, my papa, and I!” she said excitedly, jumping up from her chair also. The doorbell rang. A man stood at the doorway, avoiding eye contact and fidgeting with his hands, though in a way that was more nervous than rude and inattentive.

“I’m Sophia’s dad. I’ve been looking for her,” He said. He pulled out a small podcast radio that looked like it had been recently found in a refuse pile, shook it slightly, and said, “And by the way, your conversation was wonderful.”

One year later

Their friendship was beautiful, and Sophia was like a niece to Curtiss. She and her father, who was named Jackson, would visit often, and she would tell him all about her birthday or her day at the Social Graces Academy. Just as they were laughing at a joke that Jackson had told, the doorbell rang, and Curtiss opened it. It was a man in the clothing of a worker. He brushed off his coveralls and said in the mannerisms of someone who is chronically casual but is attempting to be formal, “Your time in the glasshouse is up, sir. Just one more conversation and you’ll be free to go.”

He stepped aside, and a man and a woman walked in. They had an upper-class accent and meant business. The woman began to introduce herself and her partner, but Sophia chirped up.

“Good luck, Curtiss!” The man gaped. The woman gasped. The same horrible electronic tone that led Curtiss to his prison sounded over the intercom.

“Interrupting another. Lifetime sentence.” said the voice. The worker sighed and picked up Sophia. Jackson stood with tears in his eyes. Curtiss wanted to collapse on the floor. After she had been dragged away, Her father walked home, crying. The woman continued talking.

“I do love our parks,” she said, “so beautiful in the springtime.” On they droned as if nothing at all had happened. Curtiss wasn’t listening. He was blinded and deafened by grief and rage for his young friend, whose life would be spent in a crystalline limbo, for her father, who would never again see his little girl, and for this wretched, heartless, verbal world. He looked up at them, shed a tear, and punched the wall.

The end.