​Trumpets! by Jordan Gisselbrecht

Bridget, photography by Joseph Corbett (USA) 2025

​Trumpets!
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She would run to the mountains that day, she decided, just as she had decided not long ago to move to the desert to save herself. They had told her that it’d be too hard out there, 35 miles from the nearest pharmacy, alone with her headaches and moods, the pains that shot through her skull and left molten sunlight dripping from her bedroom ceiling even in the most absolute dark. But she had gone to the desert to treat the headaches, to let the silence heal her perforated brain, and out here she had found total relief from intruding sensation: no people, no machines, little life, hardly any wind, and when there was wind it did not carry the sounds or smells of something far away. In the stillness, the belt around her head loosened and the hallucinations faded. But then one terrible day they came, Trumpets! - - flourishing in the mountains, exactly at noon, a thunderclap across the dry-brush plain that rattled the window of her shack. After a minute they stopped and left her in the pounding silence. They came back the next day, and the next, at noon without fail, and though they didn’t sound for long their booming exuberance was enough to make her nights sleepless and fill her mornings with dread. The headaches returned and bright amoebas tilted across her vision once more. They would keep playing until she went to them; she knew that the men playing these trumpets would keep blowing until they had all exchanged words. So she got up early that morning to run. She showered, dressed in clean pants and a white shirt, clipped her hair behind her head, slow, grinding work in her condition. Already it was time to go. She stood up from her cot and walked outside, white shoes on her feet, up the empty road, eyes on the mountains ahead. At noon they started to play. Yes I will go to them, she said. Yes I will meet them, I will go, I will go. She started to run.

Jordan Gisselbrecht

Jordan Gisselbrecht lives in Washington, DC. His fiction has appeared in or will be out soon in PRISM international, The End, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere.