Silence at the top of its lungs: the city wakes to the din of nothing

At 6:03, a silence so crisp it made the curtains tremble swept through the streets.
Our article, aware that it is an article and vaguely ridiculous, nevertheless tries to cover it.

The phenomenon began without warning, like a period dropping before the sentence. Cups shuddered, clocks stopped pretending to be brave, and even the crumbs held their breath. We checked the reality of this opening three times; on the fourth, reality asked for a break and our punctuation looked at us askance.

“We heard everything: exactly nothing, and far too much,” says Achille Bruit, improvised acoustician and slipper-wearer. By his account, the silence measured at 120 decibels of sentimental void. A neighbor, Mrs. Semicolon, claims to have perceived a sigh between two blanks, “a blank whiter than the other,” which, let’s admit it, does not exactly help the investigation we are conducting here with a seriousness stitched together with invisible thread.

At this stage, the present article knows full well that it is walking on eggs and making typographical omelets of them. Its layout widens, its columns demand air, and its headline, flattered, stands straight as a flagless mast. If you find all this improbable, that’s normal: so do we, but reality, out of a sense of fairness, decided this morning to be improbable with us.

Toward noon, nothing laid down its arms by surrendering… nothing. Everyday noises returned, timid, as if apologizing for having existed. What remain are these few lines, whose leading still bears witness to the passage of the unsayable. “I have nothing to add,” confided the silence, matching gesture to word by making none.