The silent sound of a raindrop trickling down the window

The rain had stopped. For a while, now. And a single raindrop stood poised to take a dive down the windowpane. Patience. A moment of timeless silence... As it waits wordlessly, straining thought and gaining force. It is accumulating mass, gathering together at that spot of captured illumination. Reflection, refraction and internal reflection. Held together by something someone named surface tension.

Surface tension. Waiting to break free from the surface. Or wanting to it to the surface. Tense and quavering, the raindrop stayed. And it let go off the ledge.

There was no explosion. No brute force. No captured momentum bursting into a cannonshot of energy. Silence. And a slow wormlike movement. The raindrop crept down the window.

It urged to go forward. Reach out for the ground in surges. Pushing its forces forward. Hoping to touch gravity. Pulled down by the gravity of its own predicament. It trickled, crawled, halted. Then it thought out.

Strategy. That is always part of reaching the lowermost rung.. the windowsill. And then, it pushed forward. It screeched, and sighed in relief as it carved a space for itself to run through right down the windowpane.

Violence in silence. All violence happens in the deepest of silence. We probably never understood the language.

Bookmark

So here goes...
The page was screaming to be marked. Its bold letters each climbing up a decibel until it reached that unbearable crescendo. The final symphony of pain. And relief. The note slips. The orchestra goes awry. And the stick falls from the conductors hand as he collapses to the ground in the ordeal of cacophonic creation (or was it recreation?!). Freeze... Bookmark...
The letters stare at me. They each pose a question. And they sink their gruesome stare right into my heart, like a thousand silent daggers. Smooth and soft. It doesn't hurt. Just a warmth. Or is it the blood seeping out through my wounds?! Freeze... Bookmark...
I stare at the page. It is innocent. It is silent. But its innocence and silence which poses the most disturbing of questions. You cannot answer to innocence. And you make your own questions up in silence. The words run around my head in dizzying circles. In a whirlpool of thought. Interstellar verbal orbiting. Freeze... Bookmark...
I was scared to mark the page. Condemn it to memory. Afraid i ll remember the page number and the odd tear halfway down the right edge everytime i flip past it. Condemn it to familiarity. Tag it as special. And yet never be sure, whether it was so exceptional after all. Or whether it was a moment's fancy, or a passing glimmer of hopeful fear.
A faint breeze catches the page, and it rustles in mid-air. My fingers still rest on its torn edge. Freeze...
I never use bookmarks. I just remember the page numbers.

The Mutiny of the Mutes

Dunno why it started. Maybe it was bound to happen. All i know was how it did start. And well, that's part of recorded history.
History is very ironic. It only talks about iron and metal slashing through flesh and obliterating bones. And of monuments built by armies fed on iron-rich blood, to be razed down to make more fodder. Man's monumental history of blood, and iron and blood in iron (heamoglobin, as we call it).
Yes, the Mutiny of the Mutes is waiting to happen. History reminds us that it had happened earlier. But then, the Mutes merely learnt to talk, and they weren't Mutes any longer. Became Mutants rather. The Mutant Revolution.
The Mutes talk in the voice of silence. Words cheat their thoughts and feelings. Their war songs have no words and no rhyme. Their thoughts retain their abstract selves of purity. Their weapons do not thunder. Their footsteps don't raise the dead from their sleep, and awaken them with a yawny groan.
The crumbly charred pages of books will litter the streets. Signboards will read themselves out in the language of fire. Rivers of fire will surge out of windows, in a silent symphony of sorts, intoxicated on Molotov cocktails, Dante's Inferno in a vodka bottle. And the soot and the smoke will block out the sun and lead to a cataclysmic episode of global warming, which will then escalate into the worst Ice Age in the history (ah! that had to turn up again..) of the planet. So says Al Gore. And i don't trust him on that.
The Mutiny of the Mutes remains an abstraction. Like their wordless thoughts of purity. it finds life in our silent moments of perpetual violence, when we forget to hear and refuse to talk. Stop... turn back the pages of history... or write a new book. Write of smiles and tears, love and fears. Write why i left those footprints on the beach, to be licked up and washed off by the kinky tongue of an insatiable sea. Nature reflects who we are.
Let us learn to speak.