She was talking to a neighbor when she noticed it. Her voice was no longer any good. It had suddenly disintegrated before her very ears, reduced to whatever environment she found herself in. But Lottie hadn't lost her voice––at least not in the usual way. She had lost her voice in the way that it was no longer hers. She was mimicking the voices of others by accident. She couldn’t help it.

Lottie’s neighbor had a thick accent from lands unknown to her. It was completely indiscernible, and now it was coming from her own vocal cords. You’d think she was mimicking them. That the whole charade could pass for a deliberate act, like a statement she was trying to make to get attention.

And though she had plenty of faults, seeking attention wasn’t one of them. This was a hostile takeover, if you will, by an unseen force. The truth is, when she did attempt impressions or impersonations or accents of any kind, she didn’t even come close. They turned out all smeary, blending into five accents at once and also somehow no accent at all. She would’ve demonstrated for you if she could, but, you know, she was stuck. She couldn’t accommodate you or anyone else for that matter. Which led her to become a bit touchy. And the touchiness asphyxiated her. She could no longer be reasonable.

Lottie does not take to it, these failed mechanisms of her body. She had never really liked the sound of her own voice, had always eschewed audio recordings, but she thought, if anything, her voice was at least unerasable. That was something she could live with, and did live with for most of her life.

Lottie didn’t complain to anyone right away. She chanted like a monk in the privacy of her own home, but her voice still came out all wrong. She always sounded like the last person she had talked to or the last voice she’d heard. Lottie was a renowned judge on a daytime court television show. She couldn’t abide her situation, or wait until the appointed time when her cords arranged themselves properly, or get a lay of the land and look busy while she deciphered the course of events that led her here. Her personhood was front and center. This vocal ambush came at a price in ways people like you and me couldn’t possibly understand.

“I won’t look busy for anyone!” Lottie shouted to herself in between all the chanting.

But no one listened. Especially not her own body.

That’s when the loss really set in. What? It’s not like she had ample warning.

And that’s how she entered the television studio the following Monday morning––in a mood, we’ll say. A slow crawl of the soul was taking place. As though her voice wouldn’t ever be coming back.

She could hear the secretary say into the phone, “Our studio is located beside The Point. No, it’s not beside-the-point. Yes, the big fountain. You know the one.”

It dawned on Lottie that she would adopt the secretary’s voice next. That she’d be mistaken for a cartoon chipmunk if she wasn’t careful.

She twisted the key into the quiet lull of her dressing room, suspending reality by looking at her own reflection, papering over her feelings while staring in the direction of fluorescent bulbs. The brighter the lights, the more the lagoons she had for eyes brightened into triumphant signals of justice for the audience awaiting her.

Then she panicked afresh and searched for the nearest identity.

As if on cue, one of the producers knocked and pushed through without pausing, got a good look at her, and began to back away. Lottie turned around to see if she was reacting to someone else in the room, but it was just her there. At least this producer had a soothing voice. Almost too soothing. Definitely more soothing than necessary.

“You’re on in twenty,” the producer said.

“How does that figure in?” Lottie asked, aping the producer’s cadence at every syllable.

“Huh?”

“How does that figure into my situation? What are you getting at?”

Lottie ran out of the room and away before the producer could answer. Just away. She picked a stranger to follow. It had to be a stranger. Strangers added to the appeal of following someone. She observed her selected stranger closely. He wore an eyepatch. You don’t have to observe closely to see that. This man, if questioned, would say he gets that all the time. Being followed, that is. He’d seen it all before. And he would go on to say that people tend to romanticize eyepatches when they are actually inconvenient at best.

Lottie proceeded to spy on the man. She spied on him plenty. It was getting weird. All to distract herself from her own problems.

He stopped at the meat market. When his number was called, he fell back in line, forcing her into first position.

“What’ll it be?” a teenager in a paper cap said to her from behind the counter.

She started whispering to disguise the sound of this teenager’s voice escaping her own throat. The whispering was doing its job until it wasn’t. The teenager couldn’t make out any words from her fake order.

Lottie didn’t wait for any ribeye or lamb shank to be packaged into parcels and carefully weighed. She got out of there. She left her pride strung up on a meat hook. Right when the eyepatch man was taking a liking to her, too. Neither of them considered the possibility of friendship. Friendship? No way. At least not yet.

How long does it take to outrun your predicaments? Lottie swore she could feel the heat of searchlights on her back. That she could see rows and rows of plaintiffs, defendants, lawyers, families, onlookers, courtroom security––everyone hovering on the horizon in front of her.

The thing is, everybody already knows about Lottie and her affliction. How did they know? How am I supposed to know something like that?

They called her Infomercial before this all went down. Her nickname stemmed from the fact that everything she did looked like she was one of the actors in the “before” scene of an infomercial: lost, fumbling, unable to perform the most basic human functions without some essential tool that costs $19.99 and comes with a four-pack of sponges that nobody asked for. Now what would they call her?

Lottie ran out of the city and into the nightfall. She wanted to start a fire. She looked for something to burn. She waited for a tree to get struck by lightning, to burst into an unstoppable ignition only for her purposes.

She considered staying in the woods. Quitting the daytime courtroom show to stare at moss. To find undiscovered animal species. Construct secret tunnels underground. Ignore society forever. Because she knew she could. Sooner or later she’d encounter the moss of a lifetime. Bring on the moss.

Lottie said I could tell this much of the story. I can’t repeat what happened after that. Let’s just say if she’d actually constructed those secret tunnels, I wouldn’t be here right now.