Stolen Voice

by Jason DeMatteo

I lose my voice while ordering coffee. I’m already leaning forward, already mid-word, when it disappears. My mouth keeps moving out of habit. Nothing follows. The barista waits, patient, like this is a pause I’ve earned. I will try again but still nothing.

Heat rises fast, the kind that crawls up your neck. Someone clears their throat behind me. I lift a finger, the same gesture I use in lecture when a thought needs time to sharpen.

The barista saves me. “Same as usual?”

I nod. He taps the screen, prints the receipt, hands me the cup. The transaction completes without me ever speaking. It’s efficient but that’s what unsettles me most.

I sit at my regular table by the window. Steam curls off the lid. Around me, the shop hums with other people’s voices, loose and confident. I listen the way I tell my students to listen to Shakespeare. Not for meaning, but rather for what the words are trying to make happen.

This semester I’m teaching Macbeth with the focus on Speech. Mostly how prophecy doesn’t predict, but instead it provokes. How the witches don’t force anything, they just speak, and the world rearranges itself to keep up.

I open my mouth at the table and try to say a line from the play but nothing comes out.

I press my fingers to my throat like that might remind it of its job. It doesn’t help. I try to whisper, then cough. Still nothing. The body knows what to do but the sound is simply no longer there.

Without my voice, the shop feels louder. Words ricochet around me as a student from my class is nearby, confidently explaining something they half understand. I wonder how long language survives before it stops belonging to anyone.

A voice two tables over pulls at my attention. The speaker says a phrase I use in lecture when I want a room to follow me somewhere unknown to them. A phrase that sounds cautious but isn’t.

My stomach tightens. The thought doesn’t feel strange when it arrives. My voice isn’t gone, it’s been spoken into someone else. In Macbeth, silence is always punished. Those who don’t speak early enough get spoken over. I've told my students that language in the play behaves like a contagion. It moves faster than intent.

The stranger laughs and keeps talking. Their voice carries. Mine waits, coiled and useless.

Then it comes back. A word falls out of me like it’s been dropped from a height. Loud enough to turn a head. Wrong enough to feel stolen.

I freeze. The barista looks up, surprised, then shrugs it off. Nothing important, just sound returning to circulation.

The voice answers immediately. It knows how to land a sentence. Across the room, the stranger falters. Their mouth opens but no sound follows. They laugh, uncertain, filling the gap with a gesture, as if silence were a delay they could negotiate.

I think of the witches again. How they never lie and choose the moment.

The voice inside me feels comfortable now. I finish my coffee and stand, my lecture already arranging itself, prophecy masquerading as analysis. Outside, I can hear myself beginning, explaining how Macbeth was doomed the moment he listened.

Behind me, someone tries to speak and fails. I don’t turn around. The voice has learned where it’s most effective.