Episode Four: The Sound of Nothing
received via still-breath pulse at sky-hour 0404
Francis sat cross-legged on the flattened cloud they and Cael had coaxed into a listening circle. Cael hovered nearby, arms crossed, eyes narrowed at a horizon that refused to answer back.
“I can’t hear anything,” Francis murmured. “There’s… nothing.”
Cael didn’t answer at first. “Nothing can be a message,” he said finally.
Francis nodded, but their chest tightened. After storms and animal cries and the metallic keening of cables, this stillness didn’t feel like calm.
Amidst this chorus of empty bubbles, a figure approached. She entered like a smudge in the light, a woman with long silver braids and a shawl stitched from air itself. Her steps made no sound; even the cloud withheld a rustle. She paused at the edge of the circle and did not look up.
Francis opened their mouth to greet her, but Cael’s fingers brushed their arm. Wait.
Osa’s lips parted then closed. Nothing. Again nothing. Not even the wind tried to help.
Francis stepped forward gently. “You’re trying to say something.”
Osa nodded. Tears welled but refused to fall, as if gravity, too, were on strike. When her voice finally came, it arrived as breath pressing against the membrane of sound but not breaking through.
“I used to sing the names of the dead,” she said. “And then they made my throat a grave.”
The air shivered. Somewhere far below, the mycelium pulsed once, dim as an ember under ash.
She sat, shawl pooled like quiet fog. After a long while, she added, “I did not sing only for mine. I sang for the whole ridge. For the villages burned. For the children unnamed. For all the syllables the laws could not pronounce. I learned to hold a hundred names in a single breath.” Her hand went to her throat. “Then they salted our language. Fined our mourning. Wrote silence into the air itself. I tried to sing anyway. The static entered here.” She pressed her sternum. “And stayed.” Her words thinned to breath. The sky did not move.
“She’s been in silence a long time,” Cael said when Osa drifted into a half-sleep at the circle’s rim. “Some griefs don’t ring out. They close.” He glanced at Francis. “Compression pretending to be peace.”
“Do you think we can help?”
“I think you should try.” His gaze held. “You still believe silence is safe.”
Francis blinked. “I don’t.”
Cael didn’t argue. The cloud tightened beneath them like a held diaphragm.
TRANSMISSION LOG — Still-Breath Pulse 0404
Some griefs are not carried in cries
but in the places where sound used to live.
In lungs that won’t expand.
In the name unspoken.
In a law that priced sorrow by the decibel.
In a throat turned archive and then padlocked.
Silence is not always peace.
Sometimes it is pressure at the lip of voice
compression masquerading as calm.
Grief worker, attune your ear to what is not said.
Listen for the ring inside the hush.
Hum the pitch that returns space to the lungs.
Let stillness teach you,
but do not let it keep you.
—End Log—
Francis sat beside Osa without touching. You do not seize a voice back, you shape room around it.
Francis inhaled until the ribs creaked open, then exhaled a single note. A low tone that meant: I am here. The hum hung on the lip between sound and its absence, a thread across a sealed door.
The cloud responded first. Its curve loosened, then rose and fell like a sleeping chest. Cael listened; for once, he did not interrupt. Osa’s lips parted. No voice came, but her breath found Francis’s note and matched it at a distance, the way a body remembers water.
Francis held the tone a little longer. The ears ring when a room is too quiet; sometimes the ring is a clue. They softened into that pitch the small ache at the edges of hearing until the ache eased. Only then did they let the note travel.
Osa’s fingers moved on her shawl. She traced circles, then spirals, then a shape that could have been a letter in a language the sky forgot. Her chest rose. Fell. Rose deeper.
A whisper arrived, thinner than silk: “One.”
Francis stilled. “One name?”
Osa nodded. A tear finally fell. “Carry it for me,” she breathed. “Until the wind remembers.”
She shaped the name with her mouth and breath alone, no voice behind it. The syllables reached Francis as a weight rather than a sound, like a small stone placed in their palm. The cloud recorded the pressure.
They cradled the unvoiced name between their hands. It warmed. A filament formed.
“We don’t force it open,” Francis said quietly, not sure to whom they were speaking. “We widen the room it needs.”
Cael’s posture eased. “There you are.”
Francis and Osa breathed together. Four counts in, six counts out. On the sixth, Francis hummed; on the next, Osa shaped the same hum with breath only. The cloud began to act like a diaphragm, drawing the sky down, pushing it back up. The hush developed contours.
Osa brought her hand to her throat again. “It is not gone,” she mouthed. “It is buried.”
“Archives can be exhumed,” Francis said.
She smiled without sound.
Later, as sky-hour 0404 tilted toward 0407, Francis looked to Cael.
“She’ll find her voice again,”
Cael nodded. “You’re starting to find yours, too.”
Francis looked down through cloud, through blue, through root-dark toward the mycelium’s steady pulse. “I want to send this down.”
They cupped their hands around the weight of the unvoiced name and shaped their breath into a spiral. Not a blast. A carry. They blew gently just enough to convince the air to move.
Spores rose from far below to meet the spiral, then braided with it, then descended again a soundless note at the edge of sound.
Far below, the mycelium brightened once in confirmation. The unvoiced name had arrived.
The sky did not speak. But the silence shifted, making room.
Michelle Carrera has drifted through titles like constellations: grief worker, death doula, mutual aid schemer, soil slinger, forest hermit, writer. Born in Puerto Rico and returned to let the land remember her, they now write fiction that lets grief be strange, death be holy, and liberation be cosmically queer. Buy her a coffee.