When he was young I took my son to the Science Museum in London, a few weeks later he asked if we could go back to the Silence Museum. I was really taken by the phrase ‘the silence museum’ and filed it away for later use, thinking that I would do something with that. But it sat around in that mental file for some time without provoking even a sentence. Eventually I wrote this little piece of flash fiction, which reading back now feels more like a meditation.

The Silence Museum

You wander through corridors that curve and bend, obscuring your line of sight so you cannot know where you are going. The walls are tall and made of huge blocks of honey coloured sandstone, and the doors, where you meet them, are so large that the tops of them exceed the reach of your outstretched fingertips.

The air smells of salt and sand, as if the building is near the sea, although you do not know where you are, at all. You are bathed in white light, as if the morning sun perpetually shines here.

Everything here is smooth. If your fingers graze the walls it is as if they touch a garment made of silk. The attendants are dressed simply, in black or dark blue, gray or white. Everything about them is calm, fluid. The only sound is the quiet scrape of your feet on the smooth stone floor.

On every wall there are names carved into the stone, in a multitude of languages and alphabets, creating a thin band at eye level on every wall. But you do not know the people named, or why they have been recorded here. Some rooms are full of strange objects. Some corridors take you to rooms filled with pictures of places and faces you do not recognise.

Every room shows you something new, something that you have not seen before. But there is no explanation. The only words you encounter is the unending stream of names that flow across the walls, leading you deeper and deeper into the building.

You can ask your questions here. But no one speaks to answer them.