Most people don’t realize someone has to keep track of the silences.

But there is a person whose job is exactly that.

They collect silences of all kinds, the moment before a baby’s first cry, the soft pause after a joke, the stillness that follows death. Each one is captured, cataloged, and stored somewhere no one else can reach.

It’s a lonely job. A sacred one.

Sometimes they wonder if collecting silences has made them part of them, quieter, smaller, fading at the edges of sound. The notebook they carry is filled with invisible weight; every page holds a hush that once belonged to someone else.

They don’t remember who gave them this task or when it began. Only that the world needs its silences kept, or else something inside it unravels.

And so they listen.

They walk through hospitals, nurseries, theaters, and graveyards, gathering what most people never notice. Each silence hums with its own feeling, joy, grief, anticipation, and the collector knows them all by heart. Some are warm. Some ache. Some linger for years.

But one day, they found a silence that didn’t belong anywhere.

It began softly, like any other pause in the air. Yet it stretched too long, cold and hollow, as though the world itself had stopped breathing. Their fingers trembled as they tried to write it down, but the pen wouldn’t move. The silence seemed to swallow even the sound of thought.

That’s when they realized: this was a silence no one was ever meant to hear.

They felt it growing, spreading outward, erasing the distant hum of life — the ticking of clocks, the whisper of wind, the pulse beneath their skin.

And for the first time, the collector was afraid.

They had found the silence that should not exist.

And in finding it, they had set it free.