Stations of the Unspoken

Date: May 29, 2035

Author: Esi Noire

There are no maps to the Stations.

They appear only when silence has grown heavy enough to press against the ribs.

Avelyn first noticed them when the mirrors stopped working. Not cracked or darkened – just… blank. As though her reflection had packed its things and left without a note. It happened after the forty-ninth day of stillness, when no one in her household dared speak aloud.

Words had grown dangerous.

You could taste the static in them. Letters spoiled like fruit left too long in heat. People who uttered full sentences would blink twice and forget the name of their child. Or wake up with their mouth sealed over by soft skin, breath pushing out through trembling nostrils.

That’s when the Stations began to shimmer into existence.

Not buildings. Not really.

They looked like interruptions in space…folds in the air, like fabric pinched between unseen fingers. Always located at thresholds: between the swing of a gate, beneath the crook of an archway, in the hush between two breaths.

Only the quiet ones could enter.

Avelyn, who had once recited epics in the market square, was now mute by choice. She wandered with her journal and a chipped piece of charcoal. The Stations welcomed her. She marked them with glyphs no one else understood. She could feel each one breathing.

Inside the third Station, time dissolved.

Not slowed. Not stopped.

Dissolved. Like sugar in hot tea.

There was a hallway made of memory:

– her grandmother braiding lavender into her hair

– her brother whispering secrets into an old tin can

– the unspoken goodbye between her mother and the stars

All these moments preserved like pressed flowers.

Unspoken, yes. But not forgotten.

She walked until the hallway ended in a still pond. No walls. No ceiling. Just black water and sky stitched together with silence. She knelt and cupped her hands in the water.

It whispered back.

Not in words. But in knowing.

It told her: Some truths are too sacred to be spoken. But they live on, in the ones who refuse to forget.

Avelyn stood, soaked to the elbows, eyes burning.

When she stepped out of the Station, the world had not changed.

But she had.

And the next time someone asked why she no longer spoke,

she simply touched her heart

and smiled.