hollow.lexicon

—In the beginning, the words made the world. In the un-beginning, the world ate the words.

It was 2:23 A.M. when the first book screamed. Not from its spine, nor binding—from the grammar.

Marina Okoro, linguist, boatmother, tethered breath of the lake’s wet whisper, heard it from below decks, where words nested in bundles of radio-static and moth wings. She had been listening to Quechua lullabies encoded in rust—elders’ voices played backwards, vowels spilling like broken salt from their teeth.

“La Pájara Viajera” rocked. Not in waves, but in syntax. The lake was no longer water but conjugation—verbs inflecting under the moonlight. Imperfect past. Conditional present. Broken subjunctive. Marina stood barefoot on the solar panel roof, a cup of coca tea forgotten in her hand. The stars were wrong. They shimmered in the shapes of glyphs she’d only seen in dreaming tongues: Nsidisi, Umunthu, Ch’aska—not names, but recursions, coiling back into the etymological throat of the universe.

She went below.

The children’s books were leaking. Ink ran like fever. A Spanish primer had sprouted feathers and muttered warnings in Yoruba through split pages. The bilingual dictionaries had stopped agreeing with themselves.

Words once held in trust—“tree,” “mother,” “home”—now wriggled and blinked, grew suffixes where they ought not. One Aymara folktale had begun to consume its own punctuation. A comma dove into a period. A period burst into ellipses. Ellipses unraveled into threads of quipu.

Her arm itched. The tattoo—the quipu—was unraveling. Not metaphorically. The knots were wriggling loose, tightening, then unknotting again, as if reading the lake’s mood swings. As if the quipu was remembering something older than memory.

She turned on the shortwave radio. Static. Then whispers.

—We used to speak in pollen. Then in song. Then in math. Then in scream. Then in screamless. —You teach them letters. We teach them forgetting. —We are the syntax of drowning.

She crushed coca leaves under her tongue, but even the bitterness had lost its word. The tea leaves spoke in backward Fula, predicting the death of conjunctions.

Outside, the lake shimmered.

An island blinked and was not. Taquile gone. Just ripples in its phoneme. Another blink: Amantaní stuttered into vowel rot. Gone. The floating isles of Uros tried to paddle away but sank under metaphor. Children’s voices called to her in eight languages. None of them made meaning. Not anymore.

She took a breath. Recited a poem. Swahili to Quechua, Igbo to Spanish. Words twisted and danced, failing but fighting. For every stanza, a star twitched in agony above her, as if remembering what it was to speak.

Marina stood on her boat of babel, skirts flaring in the dawnless wind. Around her, stories turned to birds, to fish, to insects mimicking syllables. She knew then:

Language was not a tool.

It was prey.

And something ancient was hungry again.

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They arrived blinking like newborns into Moriél, or Morielle, or perhaps Moor-elllehhh, the diacritics licking their ears with tongue-unknown. Sun like a god’s slow forgetting. Streets cobbled in drunken syntax, twisted past-future-villages that undid themselves one alley at a time. Greg and Mallory, hand in sweaty hand, two passport-shaped ghosts drifting on the border of comprehension.

Their phones were charged. That was all that mattered. Tools against the babble.

Greg held up the camera as the waiter droned the menu in floral baritones. 📱 “Your pig is not ready for the funeral. Suggest the basil sadness instead.”

Mallory stifled a laugh. “Maybe that’s the lamb?” She tapped her phone. 📱 “Can we eat the basil sadness?”

The waiter blinked, pupil wide as an eclipse, and said: 📱 “You must mourn before you digest.”

The food was brought in silence. Greg bit into something that hummed with vowels, like an old radio trapped under his tongue. Mallory chewed slow, eyes adjusting to the color of the plate as it changed mid-meal. Pinks into greens into sounds.

Outside, a dog barked in Morse code.

Back at the hotel, the receptionist handed them a key made of air. “No one checks out anymore,” she whispered, and her smile was full of teeth the translator rendered as [DATA CORRUPT].

Each night the phones updated. The language pack grew denser, like moss, like a tumor. Greg dreamt in subtitled breath. Mallory heard insects conjugating.

---

Day 4. The museum: shapes describing events that had never happened, or hadn’t happened yet. A guide approached, gesturing at a fresco of men boiling a dictionary until it screamed. 📱 “Here our people first dislocated the sentence. It bled for seven days.”

Greg nodded. “Fascinating.” Mallory whispered, “I don’t think these are mistakes. I think this is how they speak.”

In the gallery of maps, a room where every country was named Elsewhere, they heard a couple arguing—not tourists. Locals. Their mouths opened and closed, and nothing came out but tones, like bells melting.

📱 “Translation not available: source language has become extinct.”

They left.

---

Later, trying to buy water, Greg held up the phone. 📱 “Please we thirst.”

The vendor handed them a dead fish and kissed the barcode on its eye. 📱 “Swallow the grammar and you’ll find your way home.”

Mallory turned the fish over. It whispered in dial-up, fins glitching.

“Greg,” she said, “I think we’re being taught something.”

Greg was sweating syntax. He tried to say What, but the word ran backward up his throat and came out as Taw. Birds stopped mid-flight.

---

On the last day—was it a day?—they opened the app to speak their farewell. The screen showed only a spiral. No input. No text. Just a low chant:

📱 “You’ve arrived at fluency.”

Mallory screamed. Greg just nodded, language having long since left his mouth for wetter, older places.

The locals watched as the tourists flickered.

They would not need their passports again.

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And the bass was a tooth. And the crowd was a throat. And he, he, oh He, HE, was the scream that fed the throat the tooth.

He went by a name no longer legal in countries with oceans. It vibrated backwards in records spun counterclockwise. The lolling tongue of his stage persona was lacquered with dried goatblood and licorice. A thing with rings, a thing with feathers in its hips, a thing that prayed backward with fingers bent inward. He wore the robes of fallen televangelists, recut into glam-choked vestments that stank of midnight and wet velvet.

Tonight—Caracas or Cali or some cartel-lord’s cloaca—didn’t matter. He was On. On was the word they used in his crew, though they’d stopped speaking much since the voice-fall, when the lighting tech’s tongue had grown eyes and refused to answer questions.

The arena pulsed. Flesh walls. Concrete lungs. The audience didn’t cheer anymore. They hissed in joy. Hissed from every throathole, skinhole, Godhole. A crowd of thirty thousand breathing as one massive inhalation—waiting to be filled with Him.

Backstage, the green room was mauve. No mirrors since the last one started writing things when no one was near. No more water bottles after one screamed and tried to baptize the drummer. Just meat—slabs of it—stacked in an ice coffin. For energy.

He took the mic in hand. It vibrated like an infant vulture. “ARE YOU READY,” he croaked, but it wasn’t him speaking. It was the mic. It had become semiotic, had eaten vowels in its sleep and now spat consonants back like shrapnel. The crowd split at the sound, a wave of souls cresting in spinal-arching ecstasy.

He walked barefoot onto stage, and the stage screamed. Or maybe it was the floor beneath the stage. Or maybe the thing beneath the floor, the thing they fed riffs to in tuning sessions.

The first note—an E, bent into a G, then snapped back into a shriek only snakes could dance to—turned the sky inside out. Bats rained from it, blind and beatific. He sang into the hole where words had once lived:

O father of the reverse chord O mother of the backward birth Raise your hoof and strike the time For we are meat and melody both— (eat us as a song, amen)

Behind him, the band burned. Not metaphor. Flame like gospel. The drummer's kit melted into a language, symbols cascading into each other like mating flies. Bass notes became holes in the fabric, and through them, eyes blinked. One eye blinked in Morse code, spelling out a name not fit for cartilage.

He levitated.

The audience did too.

Everyone screaming in sixteen tongues but only saying one thing, and it was this:

I AM THE LAST VERSE BEFORE THE BOOK BURNS

His final note bled from the speakers like a miscarriage of thunder, and as it died, so did the border between voice and ear, between self and signal.

Silence followed. It howled.

Somewhere, backstage, a crucifix turned into a tuning fork and struck itself.

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Alton Greaves sat in the community room of Shady Glen Assisted Living, watching the collapse of coherence. Eleanor sat across from him, staring at her tea as if trying to remember what liquid was. She moved her lips, shaping the air into something approximating language but never arriving at meaning. Next to her, old Phil Watkins mumbled a river of syllables, his hands fluttering against the table like broken-winged birds. They were losing the words. Not in the natural way of age, of slow memory loss and gentle decline, but in a way that made Alton’s skin prickle.

“Phil, you alright there?”

Phil looked up, eyes glassy, lips working soundlessly, like a fish caught in some forgotten current.

Alton had lived among the slow unraveling of language for years now, watched it happen in the little ways: the repetition of phrases, the slow slurring of syntax, the breaking down of names into nothing but vowels. But this was different. The others—the nurses, the orderlies—pretended nothing was amiss, but Alton saw it clearly. It was not just age taking them. It was something worse. It was the letters themselves slipping from the bones of their words, consonants like brittle leaves shaken free, verbs losing their anchor and drifting apart.

And the worst part—the truly chilling part—was that they seemed aware of it, in the dim corners of their unraveling minds. Eleanor would sometimes clutch the arms of her chair and whisper, “I used to know this,” and Phil had taken to scribbling in a notebook, pages filled with clawed letters that sank into meaninglessness the longer Alton looked at them.

One night, he found himself staring at a crossword puzzle, pen in hand, unable to recall what letters were. The clues swam in unfamiliar waters. The words twisted, reforming in his mind into alien shapes. He could feel it happening to him.

No, he thought, not me too.

The next morning, he heard the staff whispering about Mr. Delacroix in room 3B, who had stopped speaking entirely, communicating only in rhythmic taps on his bedside table. A nurse laughed uneasily. “Morse code,” she joked, but her eyes were uncertain. Later that day, Alton saw Delacroix in the hall, knocking softly against the wall, staring at nothing.

The days grew heavier. He tried to hold onto words, write them down, sound them out in his mouth like stones on his tongue, but they felt alien, unstable. The news channel in the rec room was a blur of nonsense syllables, the subtitles rearranging themselves when he looked away. The newspaper headlines seemed printed in a language that almost—but not quite—existed.

Then came the day when he looked at his own name on his door plaque and could not read it.

He turned, breath shallow, to find Eleanor staring at him. She knows, he thought. Her lips trembled. “You’re… you’re the last one,” she murmured, and then she shuddered, as if she had said something terrible.

Alton stumbled back to his room, heart hammering, mind unraveling. He repeated his name over and over, tried to write it, but the letters turned to dust beneath his pen. He shut his eyes and let out a long, trembling breath.

The door creaked. A soundless shape stood there.

It had no mouth, no voice, but it spoke in the void where words had once been.

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The city hums like a throbbing wound, neon-blooded and asphalt-veined, its breath an exhaust-choked whisper down alleyways where the shadows yawn wider than the streetlights can hold. She moves through it, hips curving in the rhythm of old, primal algorithms, an economy of flesh and absence, the barter of want against the hunger of the void.

She is June tonight. Last night she was Lily, the week before, Scarlet. Names don’t stick in a place where the faces blur, where mouths speak but no one listens, where the bodies fold into each other like origami ghosts pressed into the pockets of men who will never remember them.

The signs flicker: GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, the G a broken, stuttering hieroglyph, trying to tell her something but choking on its own neon tongue.

She is waiting. She is always waiting. They come in suits and sweat, in cologne and regret, some with hands that shake, some with eyes that are already somewhere else. They don’t see her. They see a shape they can grasp for a moment, a brief anchor against the tide of their own dissolution.

But tonight. Tonight.

The man who finds her isn’t like the others.

His mouth moves, but the words don’t form in the air like they should. They slither, rearrange, become something else before they reach her ears. The sound isn’t sound. It’s a pressure in her bones, a static hiss at the edges of her skull.

“How much?“

She opens her mouth to answer, but the words twist inside her throat, writhing like things alive. The number, the price, the game— it doesn’t exist anymore.

The city flickers. The world shudders. She blinks, and in the space between, the streets fold like pages in a book no one was meant to read.

She is not standing in the alley anymore.

The man is watching her. His face is wrong, as though his features are a suggestion rather than a certainty, shifting between moments, flickering in and out of something almost-human.

“What are you willing to give?“

The words coil, burrow, nest in the space behind her eyes.

Her pulse stutters. There is no breath. No hunger. No skin.

She is becoming.

Becoming what?

The streetlights flicker, their glow unraveling into symbols she almost understands. The signs no longer sell flesh, but something deeper, something vast and waiting.

She looks down.

Her hands are still her hands.

But they are not her hands.

They are words.

They are letters spilling from the gaps between her knuckles, pouring onto the pavement in a tide of ink and meaning, disassembling, reconfiguring.

The man smiles.

His mouth stretches too wide.

“You were never real to begin with.“

And then she understands.

She was always waiting.

But not for them.

She was waiting for him.

And now the city hums without her.

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The President (you know which, don’t say the name aloud—it shivers when heard) was melting, softly, into the antique upholstery. The Resolute Desk, once oak, now a breathing, pulsing gland, exhaled executive orders in blood-cursive, twitching with sigils of ungrammar. The walls blinked.

He spoke into the red phone, not connected to any known line, but it hummed back in feral semaphore. “Send in the codes,” he whispered, though no lips moved. The air translated it to birdscratch. Somewhere in Delaware, a pigeon exploded.

There were once advisors, yes, and yes-men with suits tailored by the stitch-gnomes of consensus. Now they were husks, mouthfuls of dry approval nodding like pendulums, hollow suits echoing “bipartisan” in Möbius tone. His Cabinet had literal shelves now—each secretary pickled in jars, labeled with ironic labels: “Secretary of Future Regrets,” “Postmaster of Delusions,” “Agrarian Lies.”

The curtains behind him whispered poll numbers in a dialect only known to termites. He tried to pray, but every god line was jammed with voicemails from the drowned. Jehovah’s inbox full. Allah auto-replied in windchimes. The Christ-avatar responded in hashtags. Even the eldritch lords of the deep bureaucracy sent back “Unsubscribe.”

His speechwriter had become a typewriter made of teeth. Every key press bit him in Morse code. He dictated his last address to the Nation thus:

“My fellow indecipherables. I stand before behind within you not as leader but as leaking membrane. The Constitution drips in my lap like yolk. The eagle pecked my dreams to shreds and built a nest in my chest cavity. It hurts when I sign bills—because they scream.”

Then came the collapse of syntax: a hail of misplaced modifiers, phallic clauses, and subordinate insubordination. The teleprompter glitched into Hebrew, then birdsong, then whale lament. He kept speaking. His tongue stretched, splitting into two, then four, then a flag.

The ghost of Nixon cackled from the tapes. FDR rolled faster. Lincoln's portrait wept oil, slow and black, until the frame drowned. No Secret Service—only Secrets now. They slithered the halls in pinstriped skin, listening to the gnashing gears beneath democracy’s floorboards.

He tried to veto the Sun. Signed in triplicate. The Sun laughed. It began writing back in ultraviolet. The bill returned: EXECUTIVE DISSONANCE—APPROVED.

And in the center of it all, a fissure opened on the Seal. Not the beast below, not yet, but its mouth. It spoke no language—only un-word. Un, like a prefix for everything. Unknit. Unking. Unmake.

He tried to nuke the silence.

The button was soft. It sighed when pressed. The codes returned corrupted: ☍☍☍☍☍☍☍☍. The launch keys melted into sugar.

Outside, the sky grew a fourth color. Birds sang in Gregorian binary. The Flag stood still, then gently folded itself into a cube and wept.

In the final moments before the language dissolved him entirely, he turned to the window and saw his reflection mouthing:

“I never had thoughts. Only slogans pretending.”

Then nothing. Not silence—post-communication. Where even thought is treason. And the veto pen writes YOU next.

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Jacob sat in the full glow of the buzzing overhead fluorescents, a drowning swimmer in a sea of polyester uniforms and graphite smudged papers. Mrs. Trundt was talking, or at least her mouth was moving in such a way that language ought to have come out. Jacob could hear her voice, sure, but it was a sound detached from sense, vowels slipping off his ears like grease down glass. He blinked rapidly, trying to refocus, to wrest meaning from the droning waveform of her instruction.

“… the commutative property states that…”

The chalk tap-tap-scraped on the board. Numbers. Symbols. The skeletal frame of reason laid out in powder.

Jacob clenched his hands into fists beneath the desk. He could feel it again—the thing shifting beneath the bones of the world, unspooling threads of syntax like a fraying sweater. He turned to Tommy next to him, nudged his arm. “Did you get what she just said?”

Tommy turned, his mouth parted in an approximation of a grin, but his lips did not move. Instead, Jacob heard a response somewhere in his skull. Not a whisper. Not telepathy. Just… awareness.

“doesn’tmatternothingmatterswhathowwhywhatiswhatiswhat”

Jacob jerked away. Tommy’s lips stayed still, his face the perfect waxen mimic of normalcy. But something inside him had unraveled—no, was in the process of unraveling—his eyes no longer reflecting the light but consuming it.

Across the room, Jenny raised her hand. “Mrs. Trundt, I think…” But her voice split mid-sentence, not into silence but into colors. A spill of prismatic goo dripped from her mouth, pooling onto the desk, eating into the laminate with a hiss. Her words, once rigid and obedient, had given up on being words altogether.

Jacob gasped. He looked around, but nobody else reacted. The classroom continued in its slow, yawning, aching motion toward the bell, oblivious to the decomposition of meaning. Only Jacob seemed to notice the decomposition of what noticing even meant.

The walls pulsed. The blackboard flickered between instructions and accusations.

Jacob’s fingers twitched in his lap. His own voice, when he dared to whisper, was different now. Fragile. Malformed. He coughed and out came a paragraph—not a cough, but a fully articulated thought, an ink blot in the air that hung there, waiting to be read.

Mrs. Trundt turned to him, her face cracking down the center like an old mask. “Jacob?”

Her voice was no longer a voice. It was an abstraction of reprimand. The concept of discipline without the framework of language to contain it.

Jacob stood up. The world shook. The desks elongated, stretched like pulled taffy, sloping into non-Euclidean shapes. His classmates had no faces anymore. Only gaping, sucking voids where mouths should have been, from which spilled garbled half-words, broken syntax, meaning stripped down to its marrow.

The bell rang. Or rather, the concept of the bell rang, without sound.

Jacob bolted. His sneakers slapped the tile, his breath tearing out in desperate gasps. The hallway stretched longer than it should. His name echoed around him, but not in voices—in equations, in the decayed leftovers of forgotten conversations, in the guttural screams of phonemes unmoored from logic.

His hands grasped the handle of the exit door. It dissolved beneath his fingers.

And then there was only the great, yawning, unknowable beyond.

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She wakes before the sun, before the crows remember their purpose, before the dust dares to settle. The world is still thick with the residue of night—an ooze of whispers from dreams unfinished, a miasma curling through the banana trees like a second skin. Ayaa. That was her name once. Or was it?

The chickens outside do not cluck. They watch her with eyes too round, too knowing. A line of ants scrawls poetry in the dust, their movements not random, no, but precise. She steps over them and does not read the words they etch. She knows better than to listen.

There was a time when the village spoke in straight lines, when words meant what they were meant to mean. Now the market murmurs in tones that scrape against sense. The fishmonger hisses syllables that loop, swallow their own tails, spit bones of unfinished sentences onto the ground. “Fresh tilapia,” he says, but what she hears is throat of the river opened, closed, opened again.

Ayaa nods, does not respond. If she speaks, her words might unspool too. Might unravel into the mud like the voice of the old woman who once sold matoke at the crossroads. That woman’s words bled until she had no more. Until her mouth was a silent gape, her stories now written only in the way her hands twitched in the dusk.

Ayaa does not want to be like her.

She grips her basket, woven with care from reeds that hum in the wind. The trees whisper to each other in the voice of the ancestors. The sky is different today—too flat, too taut, like an eye staring inward. She does not look up.

The market is wrong. It has been wrong for weeks now, but today it is wrong in a new way. The people move like they are being pulled, their conversations a series of tangled wires, each sentence sparking against another, fusing, melting. She sees a boy weeping, but his tears fall upward. A goat chews on a newspaper, and the letters do not remain still—they scuttle like insects, rearrange themselves into meanings she does not want to decipher. Ayaa, the paper whispers. Ayaa, you have already been consumed.

She turns sharply, basket forgotten. She must go. Now. Before her name is fully devoured. Before she becomes nothing but a sigh in the hot wind.

The path home is twisted, longer than before. It was never this long.

The ants are still there, writing, writing, writing. She finally looks.

YOU WERE NEVER HERE.

The sky is a gaping mouth. The trees are silent now. The chickens have closed their eyes.

Her name was—was—

Nothing.

The dust does not remember her footsteps. The world exhales, and she is gone.

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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.

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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.

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