We Live off the Highway by Catherine Dodson '11

We live off the highway. Like so many suburban landscapes, they laid the thick black tongue of the highway down and these houses just kind of sprouted up around them.

Have you ever listened to the call of the road? It never ends; be it dark or light, dawn or dead of night, the highway keeps up the roar. I can hear it even now, beneath the murmuring tones of suburbia; lawn mowers, children, birds chirping in the pseudo-wilderness of the immaculately tended backyard forests.

So little of this existence are words spoken. Present in the absence of sound is the silence, or worse, the hushed and quieted tones of languages that would be spoken aloud, crushed beneath the roar of that yellow-barbed beast.