It's Still Life

Quiet Hearts

There’s a man who wandered here and there, collecting silences: the thin breath between cathedral notes, the feather-pause beneath a crow’s wing, the split-second hush before a lie takes shape.

He trapped each one in cork-sealed jars, labelling them with careful hands, certain he was gathering rare specimens of the world’s quiet heart.

But when he finally returned home and unstoppered the first jar, the silence inside didn’t emerge. It escaped.

One by one the jars ruptured, spilling out not quiet, but a chorus of things that had been waiting too long to speak.

They filled the room with a rising, many-voiced murmur, a sound like words learning how to lock together.

And in that uncanny whispering, he understood: he hadn’t been collecting silence at all … he’d been harvesting moments that the world refused to say out loud.