The Echoing Silence

Dust. It caked Mira’s eyelashes, gritted in her teeth. It was the first thing she tasted when she awoke. For a moment—longer than a breath but shorter than a memory—she did not move, only drifted in a terrible stillness. Then her body’s ache announced itself, sharp as glass. She turned her head; beneath her palm, the pavement was fractured, embedded with bits of glittering debris. Remnants of a city lay sprawled around her, gutted and estranged from meaning.

Something must have fallen—no, everything must have fallen. The sky, white and glaring, pressed down so heavy she wondered if the air itself would collapse.

She sat up. Her throat pulsed with thirst. Her mind, slow to start, replayed a distant roar as if in a foreign tongue. When had she last heard a voice? She could not remember. She pressed dirty fingers to her temples, willing herself to remember beyond the blur—beyond the beast that howled destruction through her city.

Shaking, she struggled to her feet. The world spun. Her hands clutched the remnants of a signpost, metal bent low by heat or force. She followed the sign’s ruined arrow along an avenue flanked by ruined towers, haunted by the silence that rang far louder than memory allowed.

Every footstep echoed. Her boots—unremarkable once, made sensible by necessity—kicked up ash and glass. Shadows leapt across gaping doorways where stores once sold promises and bright futures. Mannequins faced the world from broken windows, faces blank and kind in their defeat.

She passed remnants of lives abandoned in haste: a scarf flung over a fence, a child’s sneaker, a dog’s collar. A bicycle upended in the median, its front wheel spinning faintly in the wind. Each relic demanded notice, a whisper of the living etched into refuse.

Hunger prodded her thoughts, but thirst came first. She ducked beneath a fallen awning and found a water bottle beneath the register’s ruin. She drank, slow and careful, the water stale and tasting faintly of plastic. She wanted to cry, but even that seemed more than the world could grant.

She kept walking. The city sprawled out: blocks of destruction where memory pressed her close. She passed familiar buildings—the library with the shattered portico, the cafe where her friends once laughed, free of consequence. All abandoned, all shorn of warmth. Was she alone? Had others survived the calamity?

Mira stopped at an intersection choked with rubble. A tangle of buses, fused and burnt, made passage uncertain. She hesitated, blinking against the white glare, and found herself remembering…

---

The conference room had been too cold, the table too glossy. She’d watched steam curl from her cheap paper cup while the men—grey-suited, voices brisk and easy—talked around her as if she was mist. Her hands had twined in her lap, her notes precise and unobtrusive. She had tried, once, to speak: “If I may—”

But the chair of the meeting, white hair immaculate, spoke over her without malice. “Let’s move on.”

She watched a younger colleague—a man, barely trained—interject with half an idea Mira had spent weeks shaping. The senior team nodded, interest flickering. She bit her tongue, unwilling to display the hunger for acknowledgment that would only mark her as difficult.

They’d moved on. They always did. She left the meeting with her name unspoken, her work unclaimed, a ghost trailing through glass corridors.

Now, among these tombstones of civilization, her footsteps seemed the only voice left.

---

She blinked in the blanched light, breath ragged. Overhead, the dusk began its slow crawl, draining the city’s remaining color. She needed shelter.

Mira chose a narrow lane, half-shielded by the remnants of a parking garage. The ground floor, dim and cluttered but intact, would suffice. As she stepped inside, she felt the day’s last warmth slip from her skin.

She huddled in the crook of an upturned car, pulling her jacket close. The silence weighed heavier here as nighttime pressed in. She could hear her own heartbeat, sharp and unaccompanied, in the cavernous dark.

She pressed her forehead to her knees, clutching herself. Images ricocheted through her: the office, the laughter she’d never been part of, the knowledge that she’d once faded by design. The need for voice—her voice—grew suddenly sharp, almost unbearable.

Above, unseen stars blinked through shrouds of dust. The ruined city lay silent but for the smallest, stubborn rhythm—her own breath, willing not to disappear.