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.