hollow.lexicon

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.