Defenestrationism.net

by Ibrahim Abdulhakeem

I. The Fence Builders
posting December 30th
II. The Market Choir
posting December 31st
III. The Night School
posting January 1st
IV. When We Danced the Street Awake
posting January 2nd

I. The Fence Builders

They came at dawn with buckets and nails. The fence was to divide the town neatly—east from west, us from them. It was meant to stop the noise, the gossip, the drifting smells of burnt oil and roasted corn. But the builders were our sons and daughters, so we brought them water and bread.

I remember Tunde hammering the first post, saying, “We just follow plans.” Someone answered, “Whose plans?” Nobody replied. By noon the sun cooked the tin sheets. By evening, the fence shimmered like a blade in the sky.

Children slipped through holes to trade marbles. Mothers passed bowls of soup under the panels. The fence didn’t stop much—just reminded us to pretend.

When the wind tore the panels loose that first harmattan, we didn’t rebuild. We stood together watching the pieces dance off into the dust, free as if the land itself had rejected our separation. Tunde laughed, “Guess the fence knew better.” We laughed too, a choir of tired throats, the sound of walls collapsing gently.

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by Irene W Collins

[this is the fourth in a four part series.
read The Town that Forgot It’s Name from the beginning.]

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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by Irene W Collins

[this is the third in a four part series.
read The Town that Forgot It’s Name from the beginning.]

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…

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by Irene W Collins

[this is the second in a four part series.
read The Town that Forgot It’s Name from the beginning.]

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.

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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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by Eleanor Cullen

[this is the third in the three part series–
read Razz from the beginning.]

Them

They were made for each other. That’s the kind of cliche crap I used to berate my sister for saying. She’d swoon over her best friend and her fifth husband, showing me the photographs they’d uploaded online and expecting me to ‘ooh and ‘ahh’ in the right places. I had a tendency to roll my eyes instead. 

She still says things like that now, during our fortnightly video calls. Her from the villa in Australia she’s spending retirement in, me from my living room with its faded curtains and armchair. My nephew took the settee last time he visited, said I wouldn’t have much use for it now his mum was out of the country. I should’ve told him to eff off, really, but I didn’t.

Whilst my sister couldn’t have been more wrong about her friend and husband number five, I do think that maybe she has a point. Maybe people are made for each other. Those two at least. 

One of them had known me for years. She joined the support group when her hearing first deteriorated and never left. She’d returned my ‘are they taking the mick’ looks across the room whenever certain group members said ridiculous things, shared my disgust at the men who took two donuts off the snack table without checking that everybody else had already had one. She was the only person who’d ever called me Razz, saying Ruth wasn’t quite a fabulous enough name for someone like me. She’d been right, of course.

She never opened up much. Never gave more details than was necessary, not aloud. She kept her signs simple, concise. She thought about everything she said. I liked that about her, because I knew she noticed far more than she let on. I don’t think she ever noticed that I’d orchestrated it though. 

It was me who sent the other one in. She was in my GP surgery, signing with a fury I’d never seen before at the front desk. Her interpreter, having to translate for the poor receptionist, was red in the face and mumbling, clearly uncomfortable with the abundance of curse words he was having to say.

It was still going on when I left for my appointment and returned to book my next one. I had to stand behind them. The translator tried to tell the girl that they should leave, or at least ‘let the old woman’ behind them go first. Perhaps he didn’t realise I knew sign language. He certainly learned that I did when, just before I left the surgery, I corrected his translation of ‘daft old bint’.

We met twice after that, and maybe it was my sister’s habitual romanticising. Maybe it was knowing that my support group numbers were dwindling. But I got her to come along and, as those annoying twee types say, the rest is history. They took the sessions as chances to get to know each other until they decided to face the outside world.

There are only four people in the group now. Two elderly men, a teenager and a mother. It’s hard to find the motivation. The others leaving was expected, a blessing in some ways. But the two girls broke my heart. 

It was just one session when, out of the blue, their seats were empty. There was no greeting of ‘Morning, Razz!’, no ‘Thank you Razz’, just boring old Ruth from everybody. My sister told me I should be glad, that it was a horrid nickname and I should be happy to be rid of the two of them. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be forgotten. To have the people who made you feel young again realise what a boring old cow you are and drop off the face of the earth. There’s every chance they broke up, I suppose, and that they simply avoid the group now in case they bump into each other. 

There’ll be no need soon enough; they’re upping the rent and we can’t keep up. Soon the group will be gone just like them, like my sister, like my nephew.

There was post for me this morning. Actual, real, post, not just the flyers that get shoved through the letterbox every few days. This was an envelope. A creamy beige envelope, sealed with one of those stickers that looks like a wax seal. I couldn’t bend to grab it; my knees were playing up. But I grabbed the litter picker I keep in the hall for that purpose.  

One arm against the wall, I maneuvered the stick so I could pick the letter up. A wedding invitation, judging by the church bells stamped in one corner and the illustration of lovebirds along the bottom. For a moment, I considered who might be getting married. Any grandchildren of cousins, any children of friends, but nobody came to mind. Nobody who would invite creaky old Ruth to a wedding. 

I muttered under my breath. Next door’s post was always getting delivered to me, just because the postman couldn’t open their letterbox. I think they jammed it shut on purpose to stop getting all the takeaway leaflets; everyone on the street knows they’ve been on those weight loss jabs. They probably couldn’t bear the temptation of cheap pizza and thinking they’d lost all the money spent on needles. 

The two of them came round every week or so, picking up the post that I got lumbered with. Never a thanks or an apology. Always in their ridiculous ‘activewear’ as if anybody believed that they dropped half their body weight going to a gym. For their insufferableness, I was tempted to torch the invitation; there was no point in them going to any such ceremony anyway when they can’t even try the cake. Taking the letter out of the picker’s grip, I brought it closer, squinting so I could read it properly. 

Right there, in curly cursive, the letters as elegantly drawn as if they’d been printed, was the name Razz. 

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by Eleanor Cullen

[this is the second in the three part series–
read Razz from the beginning.]

Me

‘How do you know Razz?’ she signed to me. It was my eighth time going to the support group. My eighth social outing where I was relying on my own communication skills instead of letting my translator help. My eighth time sitting far close to the girl with the braids. The meeting hadn’t started yet, but the two of us had taken our usual seats beside each other. 

‘Razz?’ I repeated. She’d fingerspelt the name, then followed it with what I could only assume was the sign name for the mysterious person. ‘Who?’

She looked at me as if I’d grown an extra head. ‘Razz,’ she signed again. Then, she pointed to the front door, specifically to the person walking through it.

It was the old lady I’d met several weeks ago, the one who’d invited me here in the first place and who hosted the sessions. She tottered in, wearing more layers than Stevie Nicks, and placed her tray on a table. Shrugging off her furry tasselled coat, she gave me a wink. 

‘We met in the doctor’s,’ I explained, though I was sure she hadn’t introduced herself as Razz to me. But I wasn’t about to say that, to spend more of our precious time discussing the woman over there when I could be asking about the one in front of me. 

The one in front of me smiled, content with that explanation. She always was. She was content when I first met her, though I know I made her nervous. She was content enough to let me sidle closer towards her each session until, on our fourth, I finally invited her out to a coffee shop afterwards. She was content to let me choose where we visited each session after that, content to let me ramble on about my life, content. 

She wasn’t born deaf. I’m sure she’d be horribly self-conscious if she realised I could tell. Realised her signs lacked the fluency that she had yet to develop. It didn’t matter, though. She understood me when I went on my rants about Dan and John and the men who commandeered every conversation in every meeting and she always replied with apparent ease. She was content to let me chat, even when she didn’t agree. 

‘Betty’s?’ I continued, signing that I was craving a hot drink.

‘Of course,’ she replied, her eyes lighting up the way they always did. Forcing me to light up too, for a smile to form without me giving it permission to do any such thing. 

It settled me. Brought a calmness I didn’t know I needed. But maybe if it hadn’t, maybe if she hadn’t lightened up and she’d looked reluctant for once instead of content, it wouldn’t have happened.  

‘Sorry,’ I signed as the two of us were leaving the community centre. I’d bumped into the old lady – sorry, Razz – as she was starting to tidy up. She turned around and I half expected a smile, or a wave of the hands to signal that it was okay, but I was met with a glare instead. A proper head to toe study and a glare. 

‘The hell is her problem?’ I asked once we’d left. It didn’t do to sign anything secret in front of her; she could follow two sign conversations at the same time even if they were happening on opposite sides of the room. 

‘What do you mean?’ We were just a few seconds away from the cafe over the road, from her hot chocolate and my mocha, but we stopped. Her to look at me wounded, as if I’d insulted her instead of Razz.

‘She can be so rude,’ I explained, not once stopping to think that maybe I shouldn’t insult this woman to someone who views her as a grandmother and even has a special name for her. 

She visibly bristled, stepping away from me. ‘You’re calling somebody rude?’

For someone who had to learn sign language later in life, she sure knew how to place emphasis in a way that made her words sting.

My defence flew up then, outweighing all my rationale, and I defended myself starkly. Repeatedly. Probably, as much as I hate to admit it, rudely. The light in her eyes swapped places with fire, pure anger, and then, eventually it extinguished completely. She shook her head at me and turned away.

I couldn’t call after her, of course. In hindsight I could have run after her. Could’ve flung my arms around her shoulders and begged her to listen to an apology, a real one. But I watched her leave. My frustration replacing itself with sadness without me even realising.  

I still go to the community centre every week. Never inside or as part of the actual group; I watch from our coffee shop. I see Razz hobbling in, holding food and wearing boots that are far too young for her. I see Dan and John, and the other stragglers as they arrive.

The girl with the braids will start coming back soon. She’ll wander in, use the notes app on her phone to tell the server that she’s deaf and she’d like a hot chocolate. I know she will. And I’ll swallow my pride and tell her that I love her.

Back to the 2026 Flash Suite Contest
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by Eleanor Cullen

Her
publishing December 23rd
Me
publishing December 24th
Them
publishing December 25th

Her

I was bewitched when I saw her. And she knew it. 

She caught me staring, held my gaze until I felt all the warmth in my body make its way to my cheeks. Her lips twitched, but she didn’t laugh. Maybe I was too beneath her to be a source of amusement. 

I looked away first, obviously. I studied the laminate beneath us, the one I’d walked on so many times before, as if this was my first introduction to grey floorboards.

The ceiling light flashed on and off, on and off, my cue to pay attention. 

All the chairs, a mish-mash of different coloured plastic things and the odd metal one with a cushioned seat, were positioned in a circle. I sidled between the two in front of me and sat down, adjusting myself to avoid the faint penmarks underneath my leg. The childish scrawl of graffiti was a pleasant distraction from her. From looking back at her.

The remaining chairs filled, every other one at first – each person insistent on leaving a single seat either side of them until that became impossible. Dan sat next to me on my left, nobody on my right. I scoured the circle, but she hadn’t taken a seat yet. My breath hitched as each other chair was taken up by somebody who wasn’t her. 

I took one of my braids in my hands, fingers stroking it up and down, down and up. A habit I thought I’d left behind in college. 

Then it moved. The scrappy blue chair next to me with the slightly bent leg scraped across the floor, an unknown force dragging it backwards. I forced my eyes to look up and there she was. Her tan coat still buttoned tightly around her stomach, her brown scarf tucked round her neck and her brown thin-framed glasses perched on her nose. She squeezed herself into the circle, tucking her chair back again to rectify the ring of seats. She didn’t look at me this time.

Razz bustled in, dropping the usual tray of donuts on the table by the door. Her boots trailed a muddy path behind her, but we all knew she’d be staying behind to clear up anyway. She probably had a mop with her own name on in the storage cupboard, just for the days she forgot to wipe her feet. 

Everyone had left the nicest chair for her, the one with the least amount of pulls in the scratchy woollen cushion and with the sturdy back that never threatened to give way because it had had enough. She took it with a grateful smile, then tugged up her sleeves. Around her wrists, covering the scars that only a few of us knew were there, were beaded bracelets. Probably made by her sister’s grandkids. She wore bangles once, but thankfully they seemed to have been left at home. 

She delivered her regular welcome speech, telling us what was going to happen over the next hour and describing our little hall as a safe place. A sanctuary. The phrases used to make me nauseous with how pathetic they felt, but I was grateful for them in that moment. Grateful for them because my stomach was churning at the thought of her being so close to me. At her legs resting so close to mine. At her thigh getting closer and closer and… we were touching.

Razz gave me a knowing look as she continued, her eyes lingering on our legs and a smirk twitching at her mouth. The crafty old cow. What did she know?

Me

‘How do you know Razz?’ she signed to me. It was my eighth time going to the support group. My eighth social outing where I was relying on my own communication skills instead of letting my translator help. My eighth time sitting far close to the girl with the braids. The meeting hadn’t started yet, but the two of us had taken our usual seats beside each other. 

‘Razz?’ I repeated. She’d fingerspelt the name, then followed it with what I could only assume was the sign name for the mysterious person. ‘Who?’

She looked at me as if I’d grown an extra head. ‘Razz,’ she signed again. Then, she pointed to the front door, specifically to the person walking through it.

It was the old lady I’d met several weeks ago, the one who’d invited me here in the first place and who hosted the sessions. She tottered in, wearing more layers than Stevie Nicks, and placed her tray on a table. Shrugging off her furry tasselled coat, she gave me a wink. 

‘We met in the doctor’s,’ I explained, though I was sure she hadn’t introduced herself as Razz to me. But I wasn’t about to say that, to spend more of our precious time discussing the woman over there when I could be asking about the one in front of me. 

The one in front of me smiled, content with that explanation. She always was. She was content when I first met her, though I know I made her nervous. She was content enough to let me sidle closer towards her each session until, on our fourth, I finally invited her out to a coffee shop afterwards. She was content to let me choose where we visited each session after that, content to let me ramble on about my life, content. 

She wasn’t born deaf. I’m sure she’d be horribly self-conscious if she realised I could tell. Realised her signs lacked the fluency that she had yet to develop. It didn’t matter, though. She understood me when I went on my rants about Dan and John and the men who commandeered every conversation in every meeting and she always replied with apparent ease. She was content to let me chat, even when she didn’t agree. 

‘Betty’s?’ I continued, signing that I was craving a hot drink.

‘Of course,’ she replied, her eyes lighting up the way they always did. Forcing me to light up too, for a smile to form without me giving it permission to do any such thing. 

It settled me. Brought a calmness I didn’t know I needed. But maybe if it hadn’t, maybe if she hadn’t lightened up and she’d looked reluctant for once instead of content, it wouldn’t have happened.  

‘Sorry,’ I signed as the two of us were leaving the community centre. I’d bumped into the old lady – sorry, Razz – as she was starting to tidy up. She turned around and I half expected a smile, or a wave of the hands to signal that it was okay, but I was met with a glare instead. A proper head to toe study and a glare. 

‘The hell is her problem?’ I asked once we’d left. It didn’t do to sign anything secret in front of her; she could follow two sign conversations at the same time even if they were happening on opposite sides of the room. 

‘What do you mean?’ We were just a few seconds away from the cafe over the road, from her hot chocolate and my mocha, but we stopped. Her to look at me wounded, as if I’d insulted her instead of Razz.

‘She can be so rude,’ I explained, not once stopping to think that maybe I shouldn’t insult this woman to someone who views her as a grandmother and even has a special name for her. 

She visibly bristled, stepping away from me. ‘You’re calling somebody rude?’

For someone who had to learn sign language later in life, she sure knew how to place emphasis in a way that made her words sting.

My defence flew up then, outweighing all my rationale, and I defended myself starkly. Repeatedly. Probably, as much as I hate to admit it, rudely. The light in her eyes swapped places with fire, pure anger, and then, eventually it extinguished completely. She shook her head at me and turned away.

I couldn’t call after her, of course. In hindsight I could have run after her. Could’ve flung my arms around her shoulders and begged her to listen to an apology, a real one. But I watched her leave. My frustration replacing itself with sadness without me even realising.  

I still go to the community centre every week. Never inside or as part of the actual group; I watch from our coffee shop. I see Razz hobbling in, holding food and wearing boots that are far too young for her. I see Dan and John, and the other stragglers as they arrive.

The girl with the braids will start coming back soon. She’ll wander in, use the notes app on her phone to tell the server that she’s deaf and she’d like a hot chocolate. I know she will. And I’ll swallow my pride and tell her that I love her.

Them

They were made for each other. That’s the kind of cliche crap I used to berate my sister for saying. She’d swoon over her best friend and her fifth husband, showing me the photographs they’d uploaded online and expecting me to ‘ooh and ‘ahh’ in the right places. I had a tendency to roll my eyes instead. 

She still says things like that now, during our fortnightly video calls. Her from the villa in Australia she’s spending retirement in, me from my living room with its faded curtains and armchair. My nephew took the settee last time he visited, said I wouldn’t have much use for it now his mum was out of the country. I should’ve told him to eff off, really, but I didn’t.

Whilst my sister couldn’t have been more wrong about her friend and husband number five, I do think that maybe she has a point. Maybe people are made for each other. Those two at least. 

One of them had known me for years. She joined the support group when her hearing first deteriorated and never left. She’d returned my ‘are they taking the mick’ looks across the room whenever certain group members said ridiculous things, shared my disgust at the men who took two donuts off the snack table without checking that everybody else had already had one. She was the only person who’d ever called me Razz, saying Ruth wasn’t quite a fabulous enough name for someone like me. She’d been right, of course.

She never opened up much. Never gave more details than was necessary, not aloud. She kept her signs simple, concise. She thought about everything she said. I liked that about her, because I knew she noticed far more than she let on. I don’t think she ever noticed that I’d orchestrated it though. 

It was me who sent the other one in. She was in my GP surgery, signing with a fury I’d never seen before at the front desk. Her interpreter, having to translate for the poor receptionist, was red in the face and mumbling, clearly uncomfortable with the abundance of curse words he was having to say.

It was still going on when I left for my appointment and returned to book my next one. I had to stand behind them. The translator tried to tell the girl that they should leave, or at least ‘let the old woman’ behind them go first. Perhaps he didn’t realise I knew sign language. He certainly learned that I did when, just before I left the surgery, I corrected his translation of ‘daft old bint’.

We met twice after that, and maybe it was my sister’s habitual romanticising. Maybe it was knowing that my support group numbers were dwindling. But I got her to come along and, as those annoying twee types say, the rest is history. They took the sessions as chances to get to know each other until they decided to face the outside world.

There are only four people in the group now. Two elderly men, a teenager and a mother. It’s hard to find the motivation. The others leaving was expected, a blessing in some ways. But the two girls broke my heart. 

It was just one session when, out of the blue, their seats were empty. There was no greeting of ‘Morning, Razz!’, no ‘Thank you Razz’, just boring old Ruth from everybody. My sister told me I should be glad, that it was a horrid nickname and I should be happy to be rid of the two of them. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be forgotten. To have the people who made you feel young again realise what a boring old cow you are and drop off the face of the earth. There’s every chance they broke up, I suppose, and that they simply avoid the group now in case they bump into each other. 

There’ll be no need soon enough; they’re upping the rent and we can’t keep up. Soon the group will be gone just like them, like my sister, like my nephew.

There was post for me this morning. Actual, real, post, not just the flyers that get shoved through the letterbox every few days. This was an envelope. A creamy beige envelope, sealed with one of those stickers that looks like a wax seal. I couldn’t bend to grab it; my knees were playing up. But I grabbed the litter picker I keep in the hall for that purpose.  

One arm against the wall, I maneuvered the stick so I could pick the letter up. A wedding invitation, judging by the church bells stamped in one corner and the illustration of lovebirds along the bottom. For a moment, I considered who might be getting married. Any grandchildren of cousins, any children of friends, but nobody came to mind. Nobody who would invite creaky old Ruth to a wedding. 

I muttered under my breath. Next door’s post was always getting delivered to me, just because the postman couldn’t open their letterbox. I think they jammed it shut on purpose to stop getting all the takeaway leaflets; everyone on the street knows they’ve been on those weight loss jabs. They probably couldn’t bear the temptation of cheap pizza and thinking they’d lost all the money spent on needles. 

The two of them came round every week or so, picking up the post that I got lumbered with. Never a thanks or an apology. Always in their ridiculous ‘activewear’ as if anybody believed that they dropped half their body weight going to a gym. For their insufferableness, I was tempted to torch the invitation; there was no point in them going to any such ceremony anyway when they can’t even try the cake. Taking the letter out of the picker’s grip, I brought it closer, squinting so I could read it properly. 

Right there, in curly cursive, the letters as elegantly drawn as if they’d been printed, was the name Razz. 

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by Diana Parrilla

[this is the third in the three part series–
read Systems of Us from the beginning.]

Ame Menez stood atop Nephilim’s crystalline skull, their fingers intertwined with the neural tendrils that pulsed beneath the kaiju’s armored hide. The colossal creature—neither male nor female, an unaltered echo of Ame’s own fluid existence—resembled a titanesque fusion of Triceratops and Eastern dragon, its obsidian scales crowned by a natural helmet of bone and corrugated metal that jutted like a rhinoceros horn from its massive brow.

“Dad, you seeing this shit?” Ame’s voice crackled through the comm system, their father’s laboratory perched precariously on Leviathan’s dorsal ridge three clicks away.

Dr. Emilio Menez adjusted his spectacles, watching the infernal mechas emerge like metallic locusts from the interdimensional fissure. Beside him, Kai Nakamura—his partner of fifteen years in both research and companionship—sparked arc-welders against Leviathan’s bio-mechanical spine.

“Affirmative, hija,” Emilio replied. “These aren’t like the ones we fought in training. This is the real thing, the one we’ve spent years preparing for. Now, for the first time since the gates of hell began to crack open, we’re starting to understand what they really are: stolen armor, once worn by hell’s soldiers, now piloted by the dead. Humans who overthrew their captors and took the bodies of their guardians for themselves after emptying them.”

The mechas advanced slowly because of their weight, but no less terrifying. Their hollow shells, once worn by the underworld’s jailers, now moved with the very souls they had once imprisoned.

Ame had earned Nephilim’s trust after eighteen hours of relentless combat. The kaiju’s acidic breath had almost dissolved their left arm before it recognized them as kindred—genderless, boundless, existing beyond human constructs.

Leviathan reared beside them, its serpentine neck crowned with metallic spikes that formed a natural gladiator’s helmet, while its massive haunches rippled with muscle beneath chitinous armor plating. These were living fortresses, prehistoric magnificence wedded to alien technology.

“They’re beautiful,” Kai murmured, watching the hellish automatons stride across the wasteland. “But beauty don’t mean jack when they’re trying to reclaim our planet for the permanently pissed-off.”

The first wave struck like metallic thunder. Nephilim’s plasma cannon discharged cobalt fire while Leviathan’s claws raked through mecha ranks, but the enemy’s numbers seemed inexhaustible. Ame felt their kaiju’s distress through their neural link, these battles were pyrrhic at best.

“We can’t win through brute force,” Ame transmitted. “These bastards have eternity and stolen divine armor on their side.”

Emilio’s mind raced while Kai’s fingers moved over the jury-rigged control panels. “What if we don’t need to defeat them?” the electrician suggested, his hand briefly touching Emilio’s shoulder. “What if we make them… us?”

Ame’s eyes blazed. “Infection protocol. Nephilim, prepare bio-viral injection, we’re going dental on these tin psychos.”

The kaiju lunged forward, massive jaws clamping around a mecha’s torso. Nephilim’s saliva—teeming with adaptive nanobiota—flooded the robot’s circuitry through ruptured armor plating. The effect cascaded through the enemy’s network as infected mechas began exhibiting kaiju characteristics: scales erupting through steel plating, optical sensors morphing into compound eyes that bulged grotesquely from metallic skulls.

“Holy shit, it’s working!” Ame shouted as half-transformed mechas attempted to continue their assault. But their programming encountered an insurmountable paradox—they could no longer distinguish between enemy and ally. Mechanical limbs seized mid-strike, hydraulic systems stuttered, targeting computers crashed attempting to reconcile contradictory identity matrices.

The infected mechas stood paralyzed, half their bodies frozen while the other half thrashed wildly. They had become what they fought, and their original directives crumbled against this fundamental transformation.

Then Ame noticed something that made their blood crystallize: the deceased pilots were adapting too. Through the neural feedback, Ame glimpsed their confusion transforming into something else.

“Dad,” Ame whispered, “I think the dead souls aren’t our enemies anymore. They’re remembering what it felt like to be alive, to be connected to something greater than vengeance.”

Emilio squeezed Kai’s hand. “Similarity breeds empathy,” he observed. “Attack yourself, and you achieve nothing but self-destruction.”

As the infected mechas dropped to their knees, confused and trembling in their new forms, Nephilim turned its head toward Ame, not as a mount to rider, but as one equal to another. Through their link, Ame felt no separation between their body and the kaiju’s. The last of their human thoughts dissolved into something vaster, something more powerful. It wasn’t the loss of self, it was the triumph of grasping the everything.

Ame reached for the comm but found no mouth to speak with. Instead, their thoughts ignited, erupting as incandescent flame from the beast’s throat in the loudest cry ever heard by human ears.

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by Diana Parrilla

[this is the second in the three part series–
read Systems of Us from the beginning.]

Half of Us

017-B opened to 017-A like a mouth to breath, and every night the concordant resonance vibrated between them, their singular noesis folding until distinction blurred beyond question. The external feed flickered low in the corner of their shared awareness, too faint to take priority—base reports, headlines ghosting across internal vision, something about a breach, about a missing core. They didn’t lean in. It didn’t concern them.

Inside, their thoughts orbited close, cool static and soft-threaded pulses mingling with memories like prisms catching light. 017-A moved without asking, tracing B’s sensory records with the intrinsic fluency of years spent inside the same shell, and B let her, as always. He liked it when A drifted there. It anchored them both.

There, buried under routine impressions and half-dreams, came a frame that didn’t fit. A hand not quite their own, sliding through security fields they shouldn’t know. The vault cracked open in silence. The core lifted.

The core wasn’t just data. It was rare. Organic even. Designed to restore degraded systems in avatars built in pre-fusion days, where only one soul lived per frame.

“You streamed this?” A’s question hit inwards, not spoken but shaped from thought.

B’s presence recoiled a fraction. “It wasn’t mine.”

A held the frame up again. The thief’s field of vision was unmistakable. Camera-angle perfect. Not reimagined. “You held this. It’s yours.”

“No. I received it. It was already passing when I caught it. It came from 033, I think.”

“You think?” A’s presence pressed in closer, dubiously. “You traced a memory that wasn’t yours—deep enough to feel it like it happened to you—and you didn’t ask who fed it into you?”

“There was no pushback,” B said. “They let me take it.”

Only family could do that. Only family could open like that, leave a mind unguarded enough to pass through, to let impressions fold from one into another without walls or protest. That was the rule, the rhythm. Eighty percent resonance meant you could dissolve into someone else and carry their sense of reality like your own, and B had done exactly that.

A recoiled. In silence. She pulled back from the sync just far enough to feel herself separate again.

B stayed there, still open.

“It wasn’t 033,” B said finally. “Not directly. Someone else. Someone passed it to them first.”

Other family members crossed their path that day. 014 greeted them in the corridor. 033 met their gaze during the prep cycle, as if waiting for a question that never came. 058 coughed just as they passed, half-drowned in the noise of the hangar.

Inside their minds, the shallow repetition of the theft POV resurfaced too clearly. B had absorbed it deeply enough that A couldn’t tell anymore if she’d lived it or simply watched it loop so many times it fused with her own recall. The line had frayed, because when you carried someone else’s memory inside you, and let yourself feel it without recoil, you couldn’t always tell if the reaction was yours, or if it had become yours by proximity.

“You wanted to protect whoever it was,” A said one night, as they hovered again in the blend of thought before sleep. “But you also wanted to know.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” B said.

But not all families would protect a thief.

They entered the sim-job as usual. The scene: a desertified warzone under a failing day-cycle. Props, drones, and camera angles designed for client immersion. They moved in sync, performing a task that demanded strict concomitant choreography. The outcome was fake, a fabricated reality the patrons paid to believe in. But their bodies weren’t.

When the rig collapsed and part of B’s leg got trapped beneath the ruined rover—since B was the one running the op and steering their joint body—they both felt the sickening jolt ripple through their united nerves.

They couldn’t call for assistance without pausing the sim. They couldn’t pause the sim without breaching immersion, revealing the lie to the visitors.

A left their shared vessel briefly; that was allowed, but never for long. When she returned—as if seizing a precious core required only seconds—she subtly held up the core and locked it into B’s thigh port.

B stared. “You—”

“No.”

“Then who?”

“Does it matter?”

Someone had passed it on, and passed it on again. At least three family members had carried it before her. Half of them. Yet not one named the source. Not one had betrayed the line.

Later, tucked into the narrow coil of their sync bay, B asked A, “How did they know I’d need it? The core. The accident hadn’t happened yet. And I’m not sure I like the idea of one of us stealing. Even if it was for me.”

The overhead feed drifted on: static-laced news reporting that the missing core had been returned, that a trainee from sim-effects had been caught and reprimanded. Not one of theirs. Not even close.

In the common room, 014 leaned against the recharge rack, rewrapping a frayed tether. 058 sorted connectors by color. 033 stared into their visor’s darkness. It was cramped, as always, but didn’t feel like too much. Their silent closeness spoke volumes.

That night, B finally watched the full footage. Not just the breach, but what came after. He’d cut it short before, not ready. Now he saw the end: one of their own returning the core, slipping it back into its cradle instead of fleeing with the spoils. Then a check—cracked, halved, but not critical. Just old. The free core replacements were backlogged. Bureaucracy.

In the sync drift, B watched the memory A had caught: two figures in a back corridor. One held half a core. The other, no core at all—a sacrifice made to 017 earlier.

One gave. The other made do. No names. No explanation, only hands filling what was missing.

B didn’t ask again. He understood now what family really meant.

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