There was once a person who collected silences. Not sounds, not echoes, not even the absences between words. No, they gathered the moments when the world itself seemed to pause and hold its breath. They kept them in small glass vials, labeled in looping handwriting: Before the confession, After the laughter, Between forgiveness and regret. Each silence had a texture. Some were smooth as silk like those from newborn nurseries, where the air trembled with future. Some were brittle and sharp, like the hush following a slammed door. Some hummed faintly, still vibrating with the ghosts of what had just been said.

The Collector (no one knew their name) walked the world with an ear tuned to absence. They had learned to slip between heartbeats, to stand quietly in corners of crowded rooms, and to feel the softest tremor of stillness settle in their palms. They loved the silence before love most of all. It was delicate, uncertain, like the moment before two magnets snapped together. The Collector would hold such silences to their chest and feel them thrum with invisible possibility.

One day, while wandering through a deserted city park at dusk, the Collector heard a silence that made their bones ache. It came from nowhere, yet filled everything. It wasn’t the shy hush of falling night or the peace after rain. It was vast. Heavy. Ancient. The kind of silence that doesn’t wait for anything to follow.

Drawn by instinct, they followed it to a derelict bandstand overgrown with ivy. There, the silence pooled thickly, pressing down like deep water. The Collector’s breath slowed. They reached out a hand.

The air around them shivered and the silence leapt. It rushed into the Collector’s chest, cold and immense, and the world snapped inward.

They fell to their knees. The jars in their satchel rattled wildly; some cracked, releasing the sighs and pauses of centuries. The silence inside them pulsed once, then began to whisper.

It was not a voice. Not quite. It was the memory of a voice.

"You shouldn’t have found me."

The Collector staggered back, clutching their ribs. “What are you?”

"The first silence."

The words bloomed in their skull, heavy with meaning. The one before the first word was spoken. Before thought, before sound, before everything that could be broken.

The Collector’s throat tightened. “Why can I hear you?”

"Because you’ve taken too many of the others. You’ve thinned the veil."

The Collector trembled. In the distance, they could feel the world’s delicate hum falter, the chatter of wind, of cities, of hearts.

They thought of all the silences they had bottled and labeled, the beauty they had stolen from living moments. What if the world needed those pauses to breathe?

The ancient silence pressed closer, colder. "Return them."

The Collector fumbled with their satchel. The vials clinked as they opened one by one, releasing soft breaths into the air. Each silence flew home. Back to hospital rooms and confession benches, back to graveyards and bedrooms and playgrounds at dusk.

When the last vial was opened, only the great silence remained. It lingered in their chest, vast and still.

The Collector whispered, “And you?”

"I was never meant to end," it said. "But I will rest again."

And then it slipped away.

The world exhaled. Crickets began to sing. A tram bell rang somewhere far off. The night refilled with life.

The Collector sat alone in the bandstand, hands empty, satchel hollow. For the first time in their long life, they felt a silence that was their own. Not collected, not borrowed.

It was small and soft and human.

And they decided to keep only that one.