hollow.lexicon

First, there was the glottal stop.

A hiccup in the throat of the cosmos, a pause not of silence but of waiting. Before names, before breath, before the first lie shaped into sound, it opened—not a mouth, but the idea of a mouth, a vector, a gaping absence between intentions. It did not speak. It listened.

And by listening, it changed.

It coiled itself in the places between—between bark shrieks and dolphin clicks, between the ultraviolet murmurs of bee-dance and the convulsive twitch of octopus skin. It nested in the thermal croak of tectonic plates, in the infrasound groans of glaciers calving. And when humans began to speak, it fed.

Not on words.

On the spaces between them.

Every pause, every stutter, every gasp was a feast. It burrowed deeper, found its home in hesitation, its temple in ellipsis. The longer the breath before the confession, the richer the sacrament.

It is old. It has never had a name, because names require boundaries, and it lives precisely where boundaries fail.

Call it a god, and it forgets you. Call it a thought, and it remembers too much. It is the one that waits when a sentence trails off—

Like this:

“I just wanted to say that I…”

(It smiles.)

It arrived fully when the first mother forgot her child’s name and whispered something else instead. The word took root. It did not mean, it unmeant. It propagated through lullabies like mold on fruit, soft and sweet and irreversible. Children learned it in their sleep. Teachers scrawled it on boards that erased themselves. Radio hosts swallowed it live on air, went silent mid-broadcast, never returned.

It comes in waves.

The birds forget their calls and fly in circles until their wings become punctuation. Wolves howl equations. Orchids bloom in palindromes. Semantics decay into ritual. The internet speaks in riddles of itself. Even the wind begins to hesitate, as though unsure of its own direction.

Somewhere in a tower of shrieking servers and panting heat sinks, a linguist tries to map the pattern. She overlays sonograms of collapsing dialects, and finds something horrifying:

The silences line up.

Across every tongue, every region, every extinct or invented form of speech—there is the same beat, the same unvoiced gap, repeating like a drum someone is beating with the edge of time. She loops it, reverses it, slows it to a crawl, and hears:

“You were always a sentence I interrupted.”

Her ears bleed. Her tongue falls still.

She never speaks again.

And now it rises. Not quickly. No, not yet. It is not bound by time, and so it takes its time.

Every text message left unsent. Every “hello?” that hangs too long on the line. Every poem abandoned mid-verse. Every child asking, “What’s that word for—” and never finishing the question. These are its cathedrals.

Somewhere, a theologian forgets how to pronounce God.

Somewhere else, a child laughs and bites their own tongue off mid-nursery rhyme.

Somewhere else still, you are reading this, and you feel the pressure, don’t you?

That tingle at the base of the skull? The breath you just held too long?

It is there.

Waiting.

Not to speak.

But to unmake your need to.

Jonas Breck awoke to the dripping sound, the slow hemorrhage of meaning into the cracks of the floorboards. Each bead of liquid syllable struck the wood, splattered, reformed, became something else. He blinked; the walls had stopped speaking in wallpaper tongues, but the ceiling still hummed.

A whispering tide in the streets. The city no longer breathed in coherent sentences. He stepped outside, and the sky was the color of an unsent letter, its envelope peeled open by something with too many hands. The trees, the cars, the skeletal outlines of people shifting between form and form, all murmured in dialects their mouths weren’t built to produce. The bus stop sign read, glorious never knowing wisp until thrice before it rotted into a non-Euclidean chuckle and fell silent.

Jonas touched his own arm, where his skin had begun to forget what it was supposed to hold. His fingers, too, had become a dialect, an articulation of bone and longing, and they trembled like punctuation marks without sentences. The people here—if they could still be called that—had begun eroding at the edges, losing pronouns, then names, then the structures that once made them separate from the whispers in the air.

Across the street, Mrs. Delaney from the flower shop had become a polyglot of things that were not words, speaking through her bouquets as they withered, petals unraveling in cursive agony. The dogs, too, were caught in it, barking in the past perfect, howling in ellipses. The pigeons had abandoned the air, their wings writhing into glyphs, crashing into the sidewalks where they lay like forgotten footnotes.

Jonas stumbled forward. His feet left behind echoes that did not belong to him. The city writhed. The neon signs blinked: open, closed, yesterday, always. The library’s doors unhinged, and inside, books foamed at the mouth, vomiting their contents in backward screams, paragraphs melting into single vowels, pages turning to teeth.

And then, there it was. It had been watching from the reflection of every shattered storefront, from the flickering residue of conversations unfinished. A shape that was not a shape, a presence that had been untangling speech from reality, string by string, letter by letter. It moved with the weight of a story rewritten too many times, its limbs fracturing into errant punctuation, its mouth an erasure.

Jonas opened his lips, tried to ask what or why or please but what came out was the sound of ink drying, of typewriters chewing through vowels. The thing turned toward him, an absence shaped like understanding, and it reached.

Then—

Jonas became part of the murmuring hive, his thoughts dissolving into the static between radio stations, into the smudged ink of a forgotten signature. The city was vanishing, not in fire or ruin, but in the slow erosion of syntax, in the unspooling of every structure that made a person a person.

Somewhere, a child tried to say their own name, but the letters collapsed before they could escape their lips.

And the whispering tide rose higher.

There is a woman in the shifting heart of China, where the river swallows the city's bones and spits them out again, tiled and flickering, as if the streets themselves have begun to stutter. Her name is Meilin, though the syllables of it twist and slur when she says them aloud, as though her mouth has been handed a language that is only almost her own.

She works in a glass tower where the wind hums through the hairline fractures in the windows. The fractures whisper to her, but not in words—never in words—just the brittle click-click-click of something bending at its breaking point. A thousand conversations happen at once: the hiss of shoes against linoleum, the buzz of fluorescent lights gnawing at the silence, the digital static of a million unspoken thoughts fizzling inside the heads of those around her.

And yet, Meilin understands none of it anymore.

It started with the pigeons, their coos collapsing into dissonance, warping mid-flight as though their throats had forgotten their purpose. Then the bus stop, where words on advertisements twisted just slightly—only slightly—so that we bring you a brighter tomorrow turned into we bury you a tighter sorrow.

Then came the calls. Hello? she would say, but the responses came in echoes she had never spoken, her voice reaching back at her from impossible distances, speaking things she never meant. And when she screamed, the sound did not belong to her anymore.

She stopped speaking after that.

At home, her mother’s voice on the phone was a string of sound without shape. The soup on the stove did not bubble, but it breathed in gasping syllables. The air in her apartment turned heavy, pregnant with meaning, but no words were left to birth it.

The cracks in the walls began to widen.

She pressed her ear to them.

The static, the fissures, the gaps between syllables—they were singing now, a chorus of unformed things, unfinished thoughts, the place where words break like bone and leave only the marrow of something deeper, darker, more ancient.

She leaned in.

She listened.

She fell inside.

And when the apartment door swung open, when her neighbor stepped in and called her name, only the cracks remained, yawning, stretching wider, waiting for the next listener to lean in.

It began in whispers, the kind that slithered between the words of prayer, hissing from the silent gaps of devotion. Father Rafael knelt before the altar, candlelight fluttering against the cracked icon of Christ, and in his marrow, he felt the murmuring of something beneath language itself. A thing that eroded faith, syllable by syllable, like the tide gnawing at stone.

*Et ne nos inducas in tentationem,* he tried to pray, but the words folded into themselves like a paper consumed by flame. Et ne nos— no, no, that wasn’t it. His breath shallowed. The Latin twisted into something that did not belong in this world, something with too many consonants, too much hunger.

He stumbled to his feet. The pews stretched impossibly long, their wooden frames curving where there should have been straight lines. He blinked. Reality snapped back, but it was not whole. He felt it in the bones of the church, in the rotting incense that had once smelled of divinity but now reeked of some distant rot, some ancient, devouring absence.

The doubts had begun years ago, gnawing at the edges of his soul like rats beneath the floorboards. At first, they were simple. The usual kind. The kind every priest wears like an unspoken vestment. Does God hear us? Do we matter? But this… this was something else. Not mere doubt, but the inversion of faith. A slow suffocation of meaning. A rot in the spine of the holy.

He stepped outside. The wind carried voices, but no mouths spoke them. Whispers of parishioners long since buried beneath the churchyard. The sound of his own sermons, played backward and stretched thin. He clutched his rosary, but the beads were wet, pulsing, something alive.

The stars above—no, not stars. Holes. Great, yawning gaps where reality had been punctured. Light should have shone through, but instead, there was less than darkness. A negative space where language had never been born.

He tried to recall scripture.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was—”

Nothing. The words unraveled as soon as they left his lips. Like threads pulled loose from a fraying tapestry. He gasped. His thoughts were fragmenting. He could not remember how to think in sequence. Sentences looped back into themselves. He tried to form a prayer, but it became an echo of a thing that had never existed.

A figure emerged from the blackness between the holes in the sky. It did not walk. It did not move. It was simply there, an outline where a man should be, but inside, only emptiness. And then—it opened its mouth.

It spoke, but not in words. It spoke in the raw absence of words. It spoke in the sound of prayers being unwritten, erased from history, from memory, from time.

And Father Rafael understood.

Faith had never been the answer.

Faith had been the infection.