Author Mark P. Smith has posted a short story to his Substack title - Human Island -
Below is a brief extract
"The wallpaper in Arthur’s apartment was the colour of a bruise that wouldn’t heal— a muted, sickly violet that seemed to absorb what little light managed to squeeze through the heavy velvet curtains. The place was nothing short of dingy.
He lived in the centre of a city thrumming with eight million lives, yet Arthur was an island. Not a tropical paradise, but a jagged, wind-swept rock in the middle of a freezing Atlantic, unreachable and unmapped.
They tell you when you’re a child that sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you. Arthur knew that was a lie. Names could sting, but there was a curse far worse than any insult. It was the absence of sound altogether. It was the ‘Human Island’ effect—a slow-acting blight that didn’t break bones, but turned the spirit into brittle glass.
The Geography of Silence
Arthur’s day began not with an alarm, but with the heavy realisation of consciousness. He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the muffled thrum of the world outside. A siren in the distance, the rhythmic thump-slosh of a neighbour’s washing machine, the muffled laughter of a couple walking past his window.
To Arthur, these were the sounds of a foreign continent."
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