The quiet man fits in spaces where it shouldn’t. I don’t always see it, but I know the quiet man always sees me. That being siad, I can tell when it draws near. The noiseless hums. The air grows careful. Somewhere in the dark, in the quiet. something adjusts itself, its joints settling where joints do not belong.

A dry patient, shifting, I can hear it, not conventionally, but almost as if through spirit. Although there is no sound, his presence rings loud. Everywhere I am, the quiet follows like an indirect shadow, hidden in the crevices, folded and waiting. Watching. The gaps behind furniture. The soft hollows between walls. The places never meant to be occupied.

I catch the quiet man through distortions of my window, hesitations in mirrors. The quiet man poses still, in the darkest parts of the room, the quietest parts of the room. The awareness of his attention presses in on me, steady and unblinking. Unhostile. Uncurious. Simply complete.

The quiet man does not retreat nor react upon my noticing it. Hidden in the crevices it lies, yet enveloped and caged I am. It feels as though my recognition is anticipated, accounted for. For quiet listens and notices with no reciprocation. I pretend the quiet man isn’t there, I reject the quiet for only in silence can one see reality through no warped perspective.

Yesterday, I looked down the hall at the open storage room door. Physically it was the same but I felt the  space had been repurposed. Not rearranged—interpreted differently. Something vast was using the doorway as a suggestion rather than a boundary. The air felt strained, as if reality itself were holding shape unnaturally. I see him, the air around him contorting in his rythm, shaping itself all the way around the frame of the door. His mouth stretched agape, his eyes darkened and tarnished, so deep and pitiful that I could see through him.

The quiet beckons me. I don’t fear the silence; I renounce the quiet nuisance, tired of his presence and the suffering he brings me. I run to the safe, grabbing my handgun, I fire at the quiet man. My muzzle killing the quiet, his body collapsing onto the ground in utter silence.

It makes no difference after all; he is still as he was: a silent inconvenience. His corpse had honeycomb holes, each one torn and irregular, packed so closely together, expanding and closing, like they’re respirating. Deep in the darkness of each pit, something wriggled, like a hive of maggots.

From within him came the sound, subtle and constant. Not breathing. Not moving. A low internal resonance, the sound which I could not hear. Whatever existed inside him was not alive in any way I understood. It was structural. Intentional. As if the quiet man were less a being and more an aperture—something through which attention passed.

And somewhere far beyond the limits of space I can name, something noticed that I had finally gone quiet too.