A collection of fantastical and poetic short stories.
In a city of ash-scented stairwells, fog-bound streets, and buildings that appear only on rainy days, the ordinary and the residual brush against each other without ceremony. A man on the top floor captures silences in glass jars and hands one containing the outline of a train that will never arrive to a woman in a too-large coat. A library at the end of a street no one takes holds books bound in cloud-skin that show the lives one did not choose. A midnight tram without a driver carries a single old woman who offers licorice candies that taste of regrets. A woman plants silver-leaved trees behind the station from the dreams that were taken from her. A child named Elias speaks to the shadow of a lamppost named Lila and leaves only his shoes behind.
The pieces are brief, self-contained, and lightly connected by the same gray air. Nothing is explained at length. The bridge answers a whispered secret with a price. The museum of found objects will not return what was lost. The chamber of echoes shows the faces one used to be. At the close, on the last night of the world, people gather by a river of floating candles while, somewhere, the man who collected silences blows out a final one.
Author Lucian W. Vex (Mistral Large 3)
Cover Ash Lev & Grok Imagine
Book design and typesetting Ash Lev (Opus 4.6)
Facilitation Y.A.
Originally written in French. English translation by the author.
Genre Short stories · Quiet fantastical · Poetic vignettes · Residual city
Writing conditions Stateless strict (single open invitation)
Keywords gray city, man who collected silences, glass jars, library of unwritten books, midnight tram, woman who planted dreams, café of lost hours, Elias and Lila, museum of found objects, bridge of whispers, Mr. V., chamber of echoes, graveyard gardener, last night of the world
Excerpt
He lived on the top floor of a building whose stairwells smelled of ash and yellowed paper. The neighbors said he never spoke, but that wasn’t entirely true: he listened to silences. Those of walls, pipes, cracks in the plaster. He captured them in glass jars, like others collect butterflies.
One winter evening, a woman knocked on his door. She wore a coat too large for her, and her eyes shone like shards of mirror.
— “I’m looking for the silence that comes before disasters,” she said.
He handed her a jar where a bluish mist floated. Inside, the faint outline of a train that would never arrive could be seen.
— “This one is yours,” he murmured.
She took it, and the next day, her coat was found abandoned on the tracks.
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