The Silent Chatter
When his bare feet touched the cold concrete, he looked down to locate his slippers and saw the scribbles. They weren't written on the floor but just below the surface, which was somehow part of...
John woke one rainy morning and discovered the writing in the floor.
When his bare feet touched the cold concrete, he looked down to locate his slippers and saw the scribbles. They weren't written on the floor but just below the surface, which was somehow part of the concrete. In sloppy cursive, they spread across the room then faded at the lamplight's perimeter.
Long unpunctuated lines, tightly stacked one over the next, slanted down like someone writing on unruled paper. John tried to make sense of the writing but the letters reconstructed as he worked to decipher each word. New lines scrambled to overwrite the others in a mad rush to communicate.
He got one phrase, or at least a part of it.
the water
No, now the shapes were all wrong. The message had changed but he couldn't exactly make it out. Letters morphed here then there. Small loops opened larger then reformed anew.
John was sure, though, that for part of a second, two words had been clear. The water. A warning, perhaps, but he lived on high ground.
The words swapped yet again but were no more clear than before. He gave up on them and looked across the floor. Now he could tell that the writing came from more than one hand. Most of the letters sloped right but a few leaned left, many written large although several were tiny, and some screamed boldly while others appeared meek.
All were too hurried to be legible. Had emotion-charged fingers put them there? Or perhaps they were the direct thoughts, or more horribly the ravings of ...
Of what?
Special deliveries of the dead? Manic missives from deep space? Creepy crawlies through some rupture in the fragile membrane of reality? One thing seemed certain. Whatever the source, it must be crowded there.