There was no sound.
But the walls struggled to breathe,
and flecks of plaster rained down like strands of an old woman’s hair who could no longer sleep.
The woman came up from the basement.
Not out of fear,
but to see a sky that could no longer be seen.
She was a painter.
There was no paint.
No coffee left.
A voice in her head whispered: Paint. Even with ash.
The calendar flipped forward,
like an endless explosion bursting through seconds.
And the clock froze
at 3:20 AM.
Day One
A dragon leapt out of a painting.
A dome cracked open.
Silently.
With a tremor only she felt.
Something broke beneath her feet,
and she polished the shoes she hadn’t worn.
Day Two
A message arrived.
The number wasn't saved.
It read: “Are you alive?”
She didn’t reply.
She just sat there, stared at the cracked photo frame, and said:
“How did you know I should be dead?”
The city emptied.
Day Three
No smell of bread.
No scent of blood either.
Only the thud of words pounding the walls.
The tiles recorded the blast.
She wrote: “We are still words.”
Then she drew the letter “N” backwards,
added two diacritics beneath the “K.”
A man saw it,
and ran.
Day Four
A child found a seashell on the ground.
He asked his mother: “Is this the sea?”
She said nothing.
The woman picked up the shell and answered:
“No. It’s the last remnant of listening.”
An old man’s cane began to calligraph across the stones.
Day Five
The mirror cracked.
But its reflection didn’t cry.
The woman inside the mirror was no longer her.
One of them was asleep.
The other,
awake and fighting.
And in that same dawn,
a verse trembled.
Day Six
The phone rang.
No name saved.
A voice said: “Remember that mountain you climbed as a kid?”
She laughed: “You saw me?”
The voice replied: “Still stubborn. Still painting.”
Chopin’s notes tangled with the roar of an explosion.
Day Seven
The alleyways had fallen asleep.
In their dreams,
they swallowed the lead.
A crow asked: “Why are you still awake?”
Sejjil interpreted the dream.
Day Eight
Someone on the other side of the wall was talking to himself.
Half of his words were Persian.
The other half—screams.
She didn’t hear it through the window.
She heard it through the wall’s skin
in the precise place where sound no longer existed.
But her skin did.
Day Nine
A man shouted: “Enough!”
His voice echoed back into him.
The painter woman said:
“No. We’re not there yet. You must go all the way.”
Day Ten
Rain didn’t fall,
but the ground was wet.
The air had wept.
Someone wrote:
“You’re alive. Do it.”
Day Eleven
She painted a piece that smelled of burned coffee.
The one-legged goat said:
“I’m not the way back?”
She replied:
“You’re the reason I stayed, though you may never understand.”
Day Twelve
Everything was just as it had always been.
But nothing was in its place.
She looked at the word she had written on the wall.
It hadn't been erased.
Just slightly more ... upside-down.
The End?
No.
These were just twelve chapters
of a book not written in blood,
but in the color of resistance,
resistance that could still be seen,
even through smoke.
Shirrin Jabalameli is an Iranian writer, painter, photographer, and storyteller. She is currently working on a poetry-photo hybrid collection reflecting on memory and witness.There was no sound.
