hollow.lexicon

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.