by Irene W Collins
The Mayor’s Silence
posting December 26th
The Butcher’s Boy
posting December 27th
The Bell Tower
posting December 28th
The Woman Who Named the Wind
posting December 29th
The Mayor’s Silence
He wakes before dawn to the sound of birds – no melody, no call, just noise. Hollow chirps, like spoons clinking inside a jar. The air smells of dust and unfinished sentences.
He reaches for the nameplate on his bedside table. The brass is cool, but the letters… his letters, have peeled away overnight, leaving only ghost glue. His hand trembles. He says it aloud, softly, to test if it still belongs to him: My name is… but the word sticks, refuses to come forward.
In the kitchen, his wife hums an uncertain tune. “Breakfast, dear…” she says, and then stops. The rest drowns in silence thick enough to taste. She stirs the pot, waiting for the word that used to come after “dear.” None arrives.
Outside, the street yawns awake, empty of greetings. No good mornings. No hellos. Only movement – shoes brushing gravel, doors sighing open.
The mayor closes his eyes, listens. Even time feels viscous, dragging its feet through syrup. The light bends slower than it should. Somewhere between one breath and the next, the world forgets how to introduce itself.
By noon, the mayor stands in the town hall, beneath portraits whose brass plaques have also gone blank. The air hums faintly, like a mouth half-remembering a prayer.
Clerks shuffle papers in disbelief. Birth certificates, marriage records, property deeds – all smudged, the ink dissolved into gray blur. The handwriting of generations, washed away as if by rain no one remembers falling.
The mayor clears his throat, ready to calm them. The old habit of authority flickers through his chest. But when he tries to speak his own name, something catches, like smoke caught behind the ribs. His throat burns with the effort of unspoken syllables.
He begins again, voice cracking: “People of…” but the town’s name escapes him too. His words fall flat, soundless against the tiled floor.
The crowd stares. Expectant, frightened, waiting for language to return. Someone mutters, “It’s only temporary.” Another: “Perhaps a trick of ink.”
But their eyes say otherwise. They look at him as if he’s supposed to fix it, as if names, once lost, can be rewritten by decree.
The mayor lowers his gaze. Even his signature, he realizes, has forgotten how to spell him.
By dusk, the square fills with uneasy bodies – neighbors, shopkeepers, children holding onto silence like a string. The mayor climbs the podium, the wood groaning beneath his shoes. His voice trembles but rises anyway, the way a candle insists on burning in the wind.
“Until our names return,” he says, pausing as if for divine correction, “we shall remain… us.”
The word us lands like a prayer no one remembers writing.
Applause ripples – thin, uncertain, ghostly. It sounds more like rain than clapping. Still, they need the sound, and need to believe sound means something.
Someone whispers, “He’s still our mayor.” Another answers, “No… he’s The Man in the Chair now.”
And so the town begins its renaming. The postman becomes The Walker, the teacher becomes The Teller, the seamstress becomes The Weaver, as though nouns can patch the hole where memory bled out.
The mayor watches the names migrate, word by word, like migrating birds who’ve forgotten where to land.
When he descends the podium, no one greets him. They only nod, politely, as if acknowledging an echo.
By the third day, even sound begins to fail. Clocks tick slower, reluctant to announce the hour. Footsteps lose their rhythm, trailing into hesitant pauses. The bell in the tower rings once, forgets why, and stops.
The mayor writes his thoughts on slips of paper – short phrases, confessions, questions. But when he returns to them, he can’t tell which handwriting is his. Some words have been crossed out by invisible hands. Others have rearranged themselves, forming sentences that accuse him of nothing and everything.
He sits by the window at night, listening to the walls breathe. Conversations drift through open shutters – broken syntax, half-meant meanings:
“You were…”
“I was.”
“We were?”
Each fragment hangs in the air, a punctuation mark without a sentence.
The mayor presses a palm against his throat, trying to feel the shape of his own name. Nothing. Only the faint vibration of something trying to remember itself.
Outside, silence settles on the town like ash after fire – soft, gray, unending.
Night seeps in, not as shadow but as substance. The town disappears inch by inch, like a photograph dipped in water. Windows no longer glow; even candlelight hesitates, unsure of what to illuminate.
The mayor sits alone in his study, the air tasting faintly of chalk and old smoke. Before him stands a mirror, rimmed with the dust of a thousand handshakes. He mouths syllables he can’t recall – sounds without anchor, phonemes sliding loose in his mouth. The reflection does not mimic him.
It watches. Patient, unblinking. A version of him that remembers.
He leans closer. The glass breathes fog; his reflection does not. “Who am I?” he whispers, though even the question feels foreign, colonial, a word imposed by someone long gone.
Behind him, papers flutter. His wife’s portrait fades into the wallpaper. The chair creaks once, then learns silence.
Something in the mirror tilts its head. Not mockery but recognition. As if the reflection has finally found the courage to stay still.
The mayor closes his eyes, hearing a language older than names like a hum beneath thought.
The mirror hums back.
“In the beginning, we spoke. And that was our undoing.”
The Butcher’s Boy
The morning the town forgets its names, the butcher’s boy wakes with a revelation: meat never forgets.
It has memory in muscle, story in sinew.
While the mayor hides in his silence and the townspeople drift through the streets like sleepwalkers, the boy sharpens his knife and begins the great renaming.
He starts small – the milkmaid becomes Ribs, the baker becomes Liver, the schoolteacher becomes Tongue. The names stick. Something about the fleshiness of them feels right, honest. People nod when called, even smile.
“Better to be Ribs than nothing,” says the milkmaid.
Word spreads faster than rumor. Soon the whole town visits the shop, not for meat but for identity. The boy stands behind the counter, apron spattered with holy red, granting names like sacraments. He listens carefully to each heartbeat before deciding.
“You sound like Marrow,” he tells an old man. “Deep and hidden.”
By dusk, his chalkboard lists more names than cuts of meat.
The town, once faceless, hums again – each new name salted and sealed, a small defiance against the blankness.
At night, the boy sleeps easily. In dreams, he hears the chorus of his renamed world whisper: We exist, we exist, we exist.
By the next week, the butcher’s boy has turned the town into a market of identities. He paints signs over doorways – Sirloin, Stew, Marrow, Tripe. Even the church bears a new label: The Bonehouse.
His brush moves like a blade – swift, decisive, economical.
Some resist at first. The priest mutters, “We are not livestock.” The boy replies, “Livestock remember their names longer than men.”
Soon even the priest accepts his title: Tongue Prime.
Commerce thrives again. The townsfolk begin to trade not goods, but words. Sirloin sells candles to Brisket, Marrow repairs clocks for Shank. Conversations regain rhythm – short, clipped, pulsing like arteries.
“Morning, Stew.”
“Morning, Chop.”
“The weather’s raw.”
“So’s life.”
Their laughter sounds like cleavers tapping bone.
It becomes a ritual – every transaction a remembrance of self. The market smells of sawdust, smoke, and resurrection.
In his notebook, the boy writes:
Meat equals meaning. Meaning equals mercy.
He doesn’t quite understand it, but it feels true.
At night, he counts his coins and listens to the rhythm of the butcher’s knives in the back room – punctuation in motion, commas between cleavings.
He wonders if this is what language feels like before it’s cooked.
By the seventh nameless dawn, the butcher’s boy declares a feast. A celebration, he says… of identity rediscovered, of flesh redeemed.
They gather in the town square beneath a banner painted in animal blood: WE ARE WHAT WE ARE.
Tables sag with roasted meats and boiling stews. The air hums with smoke, hunger, and something holier as though language itself might be cooked back into them. The boy, knife at his hip like a crown, presides from the fountain’s edge.
He calls each name aloud like a prayer.
“Ribs!”
“Tongue!”
“Marrow!”
Each voice answers, proud, trembling. The echo rings through the square like a hymn of survival.
They eat. They chant. Their laughter turns rhythmic, animal – a chorus of chewing and naming. Children drum the tables with their spoons; old men toast to themselves. For the first time since the forgetting, the town feels whole.
Then, the mayor appears – late, drawn, a shadow among flames. He sits beside the boy, watches the meat steam, lifts a spoon of stew to his lips.
He tastes guilt. It clings to his tongue like a secret.
“This,” he murmurs, “isn’t how we come back.”
The boy looks at him, unblinking. “It’s how we stay.”
Across the square, the townsfolk begin chanting their names faster, louder, as if afraid silence might eat them next.
By nightfall, the fires dim. Bones pile like relics. The boy’s apron glows dark red in the torchlight.
In the final echo before the embers die, someone whispers – softly, almost reverently:
“What were we before this?”
No one answers. The question feels raw, unsalted.
The morning after the banquet, the butcher’s boy wakes to a town emptied of language again.
Signs hang blank. Doors bare. The air tastes like boiled water – thin, directionless.
He runs to the square. Tables overturned, ashes scattered. Plates of meat, untouched or half-eaten, lie nameless in the dirt. He lifts a piece – flesh, still warm, but cannot tell if it’s lamb, pig, or man.
He whispers the names he gave them: Ribs, Liver, Tongue, Marrow.
Nothing answers. The words fall flat, boneless.
He rushes to the shop. His chalkboard gleams clean, as if rain has licked it. In the reflection of the counter glass, he sees his face blur – boy, butcher, namer, nobody.
He carves new names into the table: Bone. Salt. Forgetting. The knife trembles. The cuts look like letters, but mean nothing.
Outside, the mayor’s chair is empty. The bell tower doesn’t ring. Only the faint hum of flies, the small sound of memory decaying.
He sits. Stares at his hands, the same hands that once gave names, once gave order. Now they look strange, unfamiliar, as though borrowed.
He licks his fingers.
Salt.
Blood.
And something else… something like forgetting.
The taste settles in his mouth, heavy and final, as if the town itself has chosen silence again, not as loss this time, but as peace.
In the distance, the horizon whitens – the kind of blankness that erases everything, even guilt.
And in that blankness, he smiles – small, sad, almost holy.
Because at last, no one has a name to lose.
The Bell Tower
Every noon, the bell rings.
No one knows who rings it anymore.
The townspeople pause – hands midair, spoons hovering above soup, words frozen on their lips. The sound trembles through the streets like something alive, something remembering.
High above them, the bellkeeper dreams.
In his dream, the bell rings him. He feels it in his ribs first – the vibration humming through bone, deep and resonant. His lungs fill with the echo, and each breath tolls another hour into existence.
He no longer remembers when he began this work, or whether it was ever his. There’s only the rhythm: pull, release, reverberate. The town forgets its names, forgets its purpose, but still… at noon, the air shakes with worship.
Sometimes he wonders if the bell itself is dreaming him or if he’s merely the body it uses to make sound.
From his tower, he watches the square below: faces upturned, wordless, waiting.
The silence before the ringing is the purest thing he knows – a heartbeat before the world remembers it’s alive.
And when he wakes, his hands are blistered from the rope.
Though he hasn’t touched it in days.
Every Sunday, they gather beneath the tower – farmers, widows, the mayor in his gray silence. No one remembers when the gathering began, or why it endures, only that it must. Tradition holds them like gravity, gentle and absolute.
The tower looms like a vertebra of God. Wind gnaws at its stones, pigeons circle its steeple – yet still, at the appointed time, the bell moans.
The sound is neither chime nor note, but something wounded – half prayer, half machinery remembering purpose. It rolls through the crowd, into the soil, through the soles of their shoes, as if the earth itself were tolling for them.
No one speaks. They don’t dare. Language feels sacrilegious here. Instead, they bow their heads, letting vibration pass through them – an invisible baptism.
Children mimic the motion, giggling at first, until even laughter feels wrong.
When the final echo fades, the crowd disperses in silence, each step measured to the ghost of rhythm.
Above, the bellkeeper leans against the rope, exhausted but unsure why.
He can’t recall the scripture, the purpose, the saint, only that the ringing must go on.
Because without it, the town would fall still. And stillness terrifies them.
That same Sunday, as dusk melts into the cobblestones, a child tugs her mother’s sleeve.
“Why do we ring the bell?” she asks. Her voice is soft, but the question echoes like a crack in the air.
The mother hesitates. She wants to say because we always have, or because the mayor said so, or because the sound keeps us from forgetting.
Instead, she says the truest thing she’s ever known:
“Because silence is heavier.”
The child nods, not understanding but feeling the weight of it. She repeats the words as they walk home – a chant, a spell.
By morning, others are murmuring it too. In the bakery, the smithy, the empty square:
“Because silence is heavier.”
It becomes the town’s new scripture, passed mouth to mouth like a relic.
The bellkeeper hears it drifting up through his window, their small defiance against the void.
He smiles, and for the first time, when he pulls the rope, he swears the bell answers in words:
“Yes. Heavier.”
And the sound rings truer than memory, brighter than faith.
The storm comes without warning – a throat-clearing of heaven. The sky bruises purple; the air trembles.
Then, lightning finds the tower.
A white vein of fire splits the night, kissing the bell’s bronze lip. The sound that follows is not thunder, but something lonelier – a metallic sob that seems to tear the sky open wider.
When the smoke clears, the bell hangs cracked. It rings flat now, mournful, a sigh of metal remembering music.
The mayor… thin as paper, voice fragile as dust – declares that it must be repaired. But when he tries to order it, the word won’t come. “Re… re…” He falters, stammers. The people wait, but “restore” is gone.
So instead, they listen.
Rain seeps through their clothes. The bell moans its broken hymn, hollow but tender. One by one, they whisper the only name that feels right.
“Home.”
And in that naming, the word becomes both wound and comfort, a reminder that what’s cracked still carries sound.
Above them, the bellkeeper kneels, touching the fracture like a scar on a friend’s face. He does not weep. He only listens.
Days pass. The bell no longer rings on its own. The silence is vast, patient, almost kind.
Then, without command, someone hums.
A low note – trembling, human, imperfect. Another joins. Then another. Soon the entire square vibrates with sound, each voice slightly off-key but achingly alive.
The bellkeeper leans from the window, watching them – men, women, children, their mouths open not in worship, but in remembering. Their humming rises like mist, wraps around the tower, fills every hollow the bell once claimed.
He feels the vibration climb up the stones, into his chest.
He laughs, softly, the sound almost a toll itself. “We’ve become the ringing,” he says.
And it’s true. The people are the bell now, breath and bone reshaping silence into meaning.
The tower, relieved, seems to exhale. The cracked bell sways gently, not from rope or wind, but from resonance.
The hum lingers – long, golden, wordless, until it becomes one with quiet.A final vibration.
A shared heartbeat.
A note that blends with silence…
The Woman Who Named the Wind
At the edge of town, where the last houses give way to weeds and memory, a widow listens to the wind.
It comes each dusk, carrying no scent, no rain – only the echo of things almost remembered. She closes her eyes, and within the howl, she hears syllables: broken, fluttering, desperate to be born.
Some nights, they sound like laughter. Others, like prayers. Always unfinished.
She begins to write them down, not on paper, which feels too small, too private, but on scraps of cloth torn from her late husband’s shirts. Each fragment is a ghost-word, sewn with a trembling thread.
Then she ties them to her fence. When the wind comes again, it snatches them, whirls them through the air – a storm of unwritten language. The clothes flap and whisper, voices rediscovering shape.
From below the hill, the townspeople hear it – a strange chorus rising over the roofs, a wild hymn of half-made words.
Some say it’s nonsense. Others kneel and listen.
The widow smiles.
Because the wind no longer sounds nameless. It speaks, not clearly, but enough.
And for the first time in years, the town hears something that feels like beginning.
It begins with the children.
They wander up the widow’s hill one pale afternoon, barefoot and unafraid, chasing the flutter of clothes like kites. When the wind stirs, it whispers through the hanging words and each child hears something different.
A sound that fits.
A syllable that lands in their chest like belonging.
They run home shouting their rediscovered names – bright, wild things: “I’m Liri!” “I’m Solen!” “I’m Fenn!” The adults hush them at first, wary of hope. But when night comes, the wind moves through the streets, murmuring those same names again, as if confirming them.
By the next morning, the town begins its pilgrimage. Men, women, even the mayor with his faded eyes, climb the hill with the reverence once reserved for graves and miracles.
They ask her – quietly, shyly, if the wind might remember them.
She never promises. She only nods, tying another strip of cloth to the fence.
Then the wind answers – slow, patient, speaking through her fingers, through the trembling linen, through the air that once forgot.
Each name it finds returns like rain after drought.
And the town begins to bloom in sound again.
They gather on the hill at dusk.
Hands clasped. Breath shallow. The air hummed with almost-language.
The widow stands among her fluttering banners, eyes closed, listening. Then she says – softly, brokenly…
“Listen not with your ears. With your breathing.”
They try.
The first syllables come rough, uncertain –
half breath,
half song,
half faith.
The wind catches them, shapes them, sends them back, altered but whole.
Soon, the people begin to echo each other. The sound builds – staccato, reverent, tidal.
“Aah.”
“Lo.”
“Na.”
“Me.”
Each fragment an offering.
Language was reborn not from books, but from lungs.
The sky darkens, and still they chant, improvising meaning like music. The widow walks among them, whispering corrections, smiles. For the first time, words are not rules but rhythm, breathing stitched into sense.
A new lexicon forms that no one writes down, because they all know it now. It exists only in wind and mouths.
And as night falls, the bellkeeper hears it echo down into the valley – a song of names returning home, syllable by syllable.
The sun lowers itself like an ember over the hill. The townspeople gather once more, every face turned toward the widow and her forest of whispering cloths. The wind moves through them – a slow, holy current, as if waiting.
She lifts a final strip of linen, blank as birth. Her hands tremble, but her voice does not.
“Every creature must name itself to live,”
she says,
“and every name must be shared to mean.”
She listens to the air, eyes closed, until the word arrives – older than sorrow, softer than forgiveness.
It fills her mouth like light.
“Aruen,” she says.
“Together, and alone.”
The crowd repeats it, hesitant at first, then with awe. The sound swells – thousands of breaths carrying one word. The mayor bows. The butcher’s boy kneels. The bellkeeper weeps, the cracked bronze behind him vibrating faintly, almost ringing again.
For the first time, the town names itself.
“We are,”
they say, and the wind stills…
as if listening back.
A moment of silence follows – not empty, but full, like held breath before the next creation.
The wind does not rest. It moves beyond the hill, beyond the valley, carrying Aruen like a seed.
In the next village, a woman wakes to her name whispering against her window. In the next, a shepherd hears it tremble through his flock, syllables stirring the wool like a prayer.
No one knows where the word began, only that it arrives when someone listens deeply enough. Children grow up saying it before sleep, as if to remind themselves that they exist, that to speak is to be.
The widow still lives on the hill. Her banners fade, fray, turn to threads. But when the dawn wind passes through them, it hums all the names that were ever spoken there – human, wind, stone, and silence alike.
The town below no longer fears forgetting. They have learned that meaning is not in keeping, but in calling.
And so, when the last bell crumbles and the last word falls quiet, the air will still remember.The town had no name,
and then it had every name that ever was.
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