Speak Where No-one Can

An imaginative composed by Leah (Year 12 Advanced)

They said nothing, but the silence meant everything. Even now, long after the ash had settled on rooftops and the last broadcast ended mid-sentence, there were still reminders. The broken railway lines swallowed by dust. The peeling murals of leaders who promised unity. The clouds hung too low, heavy with memory. No one spoke about the migration anymore, except in whispers. They’d called it a humanitarian response. 

He used to think it was reverence, or grief. The kind that hangs in a room after an argument, or a funeral. But silence can be built too; engineered, brick by brick, until it becomes a system. Until the quiet is no longer absence, but intention.

The city wears silence like a shroud, but echoes ripple beneath, faint tremors of what once was, whispers refusing to be erased. Streets, emptied by fear, cradle secrets like broken glass; sharp and silent. The government claimed the newcomers, the migrants, arrived cloaked in religion, sworn never to speak. But the truth was far colder. They were brought here to work, voiceless, tongues severed before they could shout truths no one wanted to hear.

He met her in a quiet alley, where the smell of dust and sweat mingled with the faint hum of distant machines. She did not speak, could not; but in her eyes flickered the rebellion of all of her unvoiced words. Their bond formed in shared silences, in glances that carried volumes. His words spilled like fragile rivers, reaching across the gulf her silence carved. 

Sometimes he liked to imagine their lost voices, laughter, song, and protest; still trapped beneath concrete and steel, like ghosts beneath the city’s skin. They were faint but persistent, like a heartbeat in an empty room.

The city had become a vessel stripped to its shell, waiting for something to fill it again.

His words became hers, the unvoiced roots of her apostasy bloomed in his mouth. Beneath a sky dulled to the color of old ash, he handed her a small paper crumpled by his fist, a shard of his soul carved into words and spewed by a pen: 

They cut the cords

sound isn’t so obedient

It sinks into stone,

nestles in the marrow

waiting

Words are still

but not dead

It breathes

It holds onto

unfinished songs

that press against the edges

of forgetting

The memories 

were not meant to vanish

Even voiceless

you pulse

Even broken

I’ll stay

You don't live in

screams

anymore

but as a weight in the air

as a rhythm

I can’t quite trace

a truth

That floods the streets 

when the world

lets its guard down

She traced the words, slowly, with fingers numb, her tremor a silent revolt against the void imposed. The poem was more than mere verses, a weapon forged in quiet fury, a call for voices trapped beneath layers of this engineered obedience.

She felt as thin as the whispers, as a ghost who had returned to walk alongside the living. His poem written desperately, before the censors could sniff it out, had become a ghostlight. Passed hand to hand, remembered rather than read. It spread like warmth in winter, in glances, in the shared silence of resistance. It lived where surveillance could not see. It spoke where no one could speak. 

It lingered in empty marketplaces. It grew, not loud, but undeniable. These people were not erased, they were planted. Something was beginning to grow. Maybe it was hope, fragile, uncertain, finding its way back from exile. They weren't naive. Faint murmurs wouldn't trigger a disbanded operation, but fear? Just enough would buy them a breath. Her roughened palms and crackled lungs are too much to bear. Dawn to dusk in a loop of labour; orders barked with those shaded by their superiority, muscles ached from those who could not bark back.

Free labour doesn't come cheap. Secrets slosh at the brim, the cup trembling with every new drop; every migrant another straw for the camel to carry. They may have cauterised her tongue, but they forgot to take out the part of her that burned. She waged a quiet war, devising beneath the surface. The smoke of her body slipped through the compound; paths rehearsed and blindspots committed to memory. A fixed destination. He was the only one that doesn't ask her for words she couldn't produce and listened to the ones she could give. A look, a nod, a language wrought and drowned in rapport. 

They began to speak. At first it was quiet. But it was persistent. It slithered through cracks in pavement, through steel, through silence itself. The city beat with it, a pulse, unseen but real.  

And in the deep quiet, beneath the weight of all the lost voices, a single truth remained: 

Words could be cut, tongues silenced. But those stubborn fragments of sound and soul would endure.