“Voiceless”

Voiceless

By [shayan]

They say the silence started a generation ago.

No one remembers how or why, only that one day, the town of Hollowrest fell still. Conversations faded into nods and gestures. Laughter dried in throats. Arguments vanished without the sting of spoken words. And soon, silence wasn't strange anymore—it was tradition.

Children were raised with lips pressed shut, taught that voice was dangerous, destructive. “Sound is sin,” read the etched steel signs on every school wall. “Speech brings storms.”

But I remember.

I don’t know how or why, but I remember the before. The noise. The words. I must’ve been four or five when it started—young enough to be molded by the new world, but old enough to recall the old one. My parents hushed me so aggressively when I spoke in those first few months after… whatever happened. I remember my mother’s eyes—wide, terrified, pleading—each time I said her name aloud.

“Don’t,” she had mouthed. “Never again.”

I never heard her voice after that day.

Now I’m twelve. I keep my secret like a burning coal tucked inside my chest—hot, painful, but somehow essential. I know how to speak. I know the shape of vowels, the bite of consonants. In dreams, I whisper to myself, holding syllables like contraband under my tongue. I recite poems I barely remember, nursery rhymes like spells. The way language dances in my skull keeps me sane in this town of silence.

Every adult acts like this is normal. As if we were always mute. Even the history books are wordless—filled with images, charts, symbols. No mention of a past filled with sound.

But it wasn’t always this way. I know that now.

It started changing the day I met her.

She showed up at school mid-winter, skin pale and eyes sharper than anyone I'd ever seen. Her name was Mira. No last name. No family. Just appeared in class one morning with a thin red scarf and a thick black notebook.

We communicated like we always did—hand signs, small scribbles, glances. But there was something in her look. Like she was listening for something no one else could hear.

That day, I slipped her a folded paper during lunch.

“Do you know about Before?” I had written in jagged pencil lines.

She stared at it a long while before looking up at me. Then, she nodded. Slowly. Deliberately.

Then she whispered.

"Yes."

No one heard it but me. A breath of sound barely formed. But I froze, heart pounding like a war drum.

“You can talk,” I mouthed.

“So can you,” she mouthed back.

We met in secret after that, hiding in the old storm tunnels that wove like veins under Hollowrest. That’s where we practiced. Quietly at first. Just words: yes, no, fire, moon. Then full sentences.

“My name is Mira.”

“I remember my mother singing.”

“My voice feels like flying.”

Each time we spoke, it felt like chipping away at a wall I didn’t know I’d built around my mind. The tunnel echoed with our voices—cracked and clumsy, but alive. I laughed for the first time in years, a sound so foreign it scared me.

But Mira was scared of something more.

“They’re watching,” she said one day. “The Quiet Men. That’s what my mother called them.”

I’d seen them. The tall figures in gray coats who patrolled town corners, never speaking, never blinking. Everyone pretended they weren’t there. We all learned to not look at them.

“They started the silence,” she whispered. “They took the voices, erased the records, punished anyone who remembered.”

I asked why.

She shook her head. “Maybe to control us. Maybe because words are power.”

That night, I spoke aloud in my room. Not just whispered. Spoke.

“My name is Elian,” I said.

It felt like waking up.

My window shattered before I could say another word.

They took me, just like that. Gray hands dragging me into cold vans. No trial, no questions. Just darkness.

Now I sit in a white room, alone. My voice gone—not by fear, but by force. Something in the air here burns your throat when you try to speak. Censorship made chemical.

They gave me a pen. A page.

But I write these words in my mind, over and over, so I never forget:

“My name is Elian. I remember. We were not always voiceless.”

And somewhere, I hope Mira is still out there, whispering truth into the tunnels, scattering words like seeds in the silence.

[End]