A boardroom table carved from a single block of salt. When people speak, the air becomes too thick to swallow.
The sound of a heavy velvet curtain snagging on a hook.
A library where the books are bound in human skin, but the pages are blank. If you try to write on them, the ink beads up and rolls off like mercury.
A thousand gold-plated staplers clicking in unison, sewing the lips of statues shut.
Marble hallways that turn into throats. At the end of the corridor, a shredder disguised as a pulpit, humming a low, mechanical hymn.
A man is drowning in a shallow pool of black ink. He is holding a lantern, but the glass has been painted over with the word PRIVATE.
The sky is the color of a burnt NDA. Ash falls like gray snow, settling on the tongues of the children until they forget how to whistle.
An ear pressed against a locked vault. Inside, the sound of a heart beating against a filing cabinet.
A garden of glass lilies. If you breathe too hard, they shatter.
Someone is trying to scream underwater, but only bubbles of wax rise to the surface. They harden in the cold air, forming a wall that no light can pass through.
The clock has no hands,
only a steady, rhythmic drip of lead.