The first thing Annie noticed was the note on her fridge. It had gone blank.
The words she had scrawled the night before—milk, eggs, raspberries, rearrange dentist, dog at vets at 3 p.m.—were gone. All that remained was a square of white paper.
Her stomach tensed. She frowned, shook her head, and tried to laugh it off. Ink fades, she told herself. Pens dry out. But the silence in the kitchen pressed close, heavy and strange. Clutching her coffee like an anchor, she walked to the study and powered up her laptop.
The desktop looked normal. Familiar file names lined the screen. Relief washed through her—until she opened one. The accounts folder. Empty. Just a blank white page.
She tried another. Empty. Another. Empty.
Her pulse quickened.
For ten minutes she opened file after file, frantic clicks filling the room, but they were all the same: pristine emptiness. She checked her inbox—every email reduced to a subject line, the bodies gone. No drafts. No sent messages. Just silence and whiteness where her life had been.
Her voice cracked the air.
“What the hell is happening?”
Outside, the neighbourhood had stirred. Annie stepped into the street and froze.
Her neighbour stood in her dressing gown, holding a hardback novel. The pages trembled in her hands—blank. A man clutched a newspaper, its sheets flapping in the wind without a headline. The bus rolled past, windows full of faces pressed against the glass, its panels bare of adverts. No destination, only a single red number glowing faintly on the front.
By midday, panic had begun to seep like smoke through the nation. Television channels flickered with silent presenters mouthing words swallowed by static. Children cried in schools where their storybooks had become nothing but white pages. Priests gripped empty
Bibles, their voices faltering as memory failed. Pharmacies closed as doctors stood helpless, unable to recall the names of medicines.
How long could words survive inside a mind, without their anchors on paper, screen, or page?
Annie sat on the edge of her bed with her diary in her lap, riffling through its vacant leaves. She tried to recall what she had written only last night, but the sentences slipped away like sand through her fingers.
Heart racing, she picked up a pen, pressed it to the paper, and whispered as she wrote, as if speaking the words aloud would make them stay:
This is not the end. This is the beginning.
But even as the letters bloomed across the page, they bled into nothingness, vanishing quicker than she could form them.
She gasped. Tried again. Again, the words dissolved.
Her throat tightened. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came. She forced air into her lungs, but the silence held. Even the scream had been stolen.
And all at once she understood.
It wasn’t just the words on the page.
The world was losing its voice.
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