The Silence of Scales
A staircase inhales; each step remembers serpents carved in silence.
The staircase inhaled.
Every step remembered serpents once carved, their stone backs arched against time.
Moss threaded the hollows.
Pearl-light gathered in cracks.
Silence pressed close as if it, too, were carved.
A traveller placed a foot.
The step answered with a hush.
Flame from the torch leaned inward, listening.
River air climbed from below, carrying the scent of wet clay and forgotten offerings.
The traveller climbed, counting not numbers but pauses:
silence, then breath, then silence again.
With each pause, scale brightened—
as if a lidless eye had turned.
The serpent’s silence became flame.
It did not burn.
It illumined.
Pearl-light revealed hunger as devotion, not threat.
The traveller’s breath caught—half fear, half awe—
as stone shifted beneath their hand, alive yet patient.
They climbed to the landing and did not look back.
Silence rose with them, unbroken.
In that silence the scales learned to breathe again.
The staircase exhaled.
Also in Library
The Crocodile and the Moon Eel: A Tide-Bargain
A crocodile waits in hush where river bends to moonlight. From the silt, a pearl-lit eel rises, whispering a bargain of scale and tide. What is given is never returned whole: hunger meets silence, storm keeps watch, and the river writes its law in breath.
Field Note: Blue Hour at Angkor
The blue hour settles over Angkor like a hush in stone. Naga coils dissolve into shadow, carvings soften into silence, and hunger without teeth endures. A sketch becomes listening. Each fracture is a hymn, each hollow a river. A field note on patience, memory, and the stillness that lingers.
At the River’s Bend
Dusk leans against the bank and the water forgets its hurry. A heron holds one bead of light. In the reeds, someone counts—commas between breaths. The river practises memory; cicadas re-thread a broken necklace. Perhaps art is only this: placing the pause so the note can be heard.
