Wimsey and the Sound That Came First

The weather hadn’t decided yet. The light was pale and slanting, as though the sun were still thinking it over — whether to come out properly or not. The air was damp and still, and everything in the forest looked like it was waiting for someone to speak first.

Somewhere at the edge of the forest, where the roots wove together like thought and the moss held the silence of old secrets, Wimsey heard a sound that should not have been heard.

It was faint — not a word, not a whisper — but the outline of something that had slipped out just before the unasked question. Someone’s breath that might have asked, “Do you miss me?” or “Can I come with you?” — but instead lingered in the air and then was gone.

Wimsey stopped and listened.

The sound had settled under a low fern, curled around a stone shaped like a memory.

She picked it up carefully, clasping it with both hands. It weighed nothing, but she could feel its tremor of incompleteness.

For a while she simply held it. Her eyes, wide and amber, did not blink. She did not ask what the sound had once wanted to become. She wasn't here for this.

Instead, she turned up the hem of her dress — mustard yellow and sewn by someone long ago — and pulled loose a thread.

With quiet stitches, Wimsey wove the sound into her dress. If you looked closely, you might see it shimmering with a pause there among others unspoken feelings and lost sounds of intentions.

When she stood again, the forest seemed a little quieter. The trees leaned in, just slightly. The sound was no longer alone.

And Wimsey walked on, carrying it — not to explain it, not to solve it, but simply to give it a place to be.