Category: Short Fiction

A descendent of the famouse songstress Josefine, our Joshuana glories in the contrast she provides to her more renowned ancestor. Where Josefine brought to her people the strange comforts of song, our Joshuana brings with her the rarest of silences, the kind not usually associated with our species. Dubbed by her peers ‘Defender of the Silence,’ she is tireless in her displays, rigorous in maintaining the decorum required. Like all our kind, Joshuana piped and squeaked on first entering the world, but, once apprised of her famouse ancestor’s legacy, she soon struck off on her own, developing a style of reticence more commonly found among those of a mystical bent. I say ‘commonly found,’ by which I mean common to the exceptionally rare cases encountered. Reticence of course eventually gave way to a high-minded taciturnity, and from there it was but a short step to silence proper. ‘Josha,’ as she’s come to be called, remains as much a prey to the daily hazards as everyone else but there is about her, increasingly, a quality hard to define yet discernible perhaps even to the wiliest of predators. Arguably, of course, Josefine herself might be said to have scaled the mystical, her peculiar music having had the power at times to stir the least musical of listeners, which is to say approximately everyone – our people’s reputation for tone-deafness being, sadly, well deserved. But silence, such as the happy kind evinced by Josha, is another matter altogether; the note of transcendence struck is even less measurable than the kind reached in song. That Josha appears unaware of its effect says more about Josha than it does her brand of silence. Her presence unsettles as much as it intrigues, and among those it intrigues will be the few whom it inspires. There’s not an hour goes by some rumour doesn’t do the rounds – an outbreak of silence here, a wordless demonstration there. And as in the days of her famouse forebear, it took a period of strife and upheaval to bring to the fore Josha’s particular gift. A slump in the economy, the threat of starvation: crises enough to send many scurrying into the arms of demagogues so fiercely unfashionable they sounded credible. Silence was not a word on anyone’s lips. Needless to say, things were generally noisier, considerably so. But for Josha, already long wordless, the shituation proved a turning point: her silence would be “weaponized”. That much she was said to have said; that much was apparently heard. How she proceeded to make her presence felt of course has since acquired the prestige of legend, been itself the subject of song. Scraping and working with the same level of busyness as her fellows, she is yet able to imbue her activity with a peculiar ‘stillness’. How this stillness of hers disquiets the rowdier among us is a point of contention all too loudly debated. Those in positions of power fear its effect on the workforce; those with little to lose welcome its power to instill fear. The notion of saying nothing at all as an act of potential subversion is one of the central issues of the hour.

It was a cold day in the Tonopah Basin. Ground temperatures hovered near freezing. Even seasoned Nevadans found such days eerie; frightening almost. The sun still arced through the sky, the desert looked as it did on the days it was baked, but William Navarro’s breath had condensed during his last refueling stop. It was as if the air had been shifted one world over, destabilizing the familiarity of the landscapes through nothing more than a drop in temperature.