The language of dust

 



Whispers of the Mind: Experimental Short Stories Series #21
The Language of Dust
By Faraz Parvez (pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA)

Introduction:

In the grand theatre of storytelling, experimental short stories are the rebels — they defy structure, dissolve boundaries, and speak in tongues that ordinary fiction would never dare attempt. They turn punctuation into breath, silence into poetry, and form into pure abstraction. Today’s blog features the 21st installment in our wildly creative 60 Experimental Short Stories Series — where imagination dances unshackled. Welcome to a world not just after humanity, but beyond it.

The Language of Dust
(An Experimental Short Story by Faraz Parvez)

(Written in fractured poetic fragments — mimicking particles of memory scattered across forgotten time)

I. The Fall

We were walls once.
Great. Glorious. Terrifying in symmetry.
Now, we are dust,
settled in forgotten corners
of what remains of silence.

Time unspools like spider thread —
sticky, thin, catching echoes of thunder
that once was laughter.

II. The Memory of Metal

A rusted spoon remembers —
a child once clutched it,
scooping warmth from a bowl
that no longer exists.

The child sang.
The spoon still hums,
its curve holding the shape of forgotten joy.

III. Debris Dialogues

Brick whispers to nail.
Nail hums to ash.
Ash sighs into wind.
Wind listens.

They speak in the language of dust:
half-thoughts, broken syntax,
ghostly metaphors that once meant “hope.”

IV. Post-Human Psalm

No gods, no kings, no machines —
only shadows of what was.
A calendar page flutters in the breath of oblivion,
and for one instant,
April 2035 is alive again.

Tuesday.
A lunch was skipped.
A lover was forgotten.
A revolution was brewing in the mouth of a girl who never spoke.

V. The Last Sentence

If you hold a shard of mirror
to the sunless sky,
you might read our epitaph:

“We were.
We eroded.
We echo.”

Reflection:

This story was sculpted to haunt. To remind. To linger. “The Language of Dust” doesn't follow traditional plot or character arcs. Instead, it breathes through fragments and whisper-thoughts — a poetic reconstruction of an absent world. It’s what might happen if memory survived without minds, and ruins could write elegies.

Experimental fiction, as you’ve journeyed with us through this series, is not about breaking rules for rebellion’s sake, but bending them to capture truths that conventional narrative can’t. With this tale, the form itself becomes the meaning.

Why Readers Love This Series:

Because here, imagination reigns. No fences, no templates. Just raw, startling creativity. Our 60 Experimental Short Stories Series has become a haven for literary adventurers — seekers of strangeness, beauty, and brainfire. And we are only at #21.

A full eBook edition (and later a hard copy collection) is planned — stay with us, and be part of something timeless.

Visit, Read, Reflect:

All previous stories are available at
farazparvez1.blogspot.com
New ones published almost daily.
Come back. Bring friends. Read aloud in twilight.

Let dust speak. Let silence bloom.


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