by Raymond Brunell

The air in the Linguistic Institute’s sub-basement hung heavy with rosin and old wax—a bitter scent that clung to the back of the throat like a half-remembered word. Beneath the city’s indifferent hum, rows of wax cylinders rested in wooden drawers—not sorted by language or place, but by silence: those with the longest gaps between recordings first. Elias Vorne, their keeper, arranged them by what was lost, not what was spoken.

He wasn’t a curator. More a guardian of absence. His fingers, stained ochre from years of brittle wax, traced the cylinders with reverence. Faded labels read Kwadacha, 1923; Nanticoke, 1918; Tsetsaut, circa 1900—names rooted more in earth than speech. The voices inside had been captured by men lugging heavy gear and heavier agendas: anthropologists, missionaries, colonial officers convinced these tongues were dying. Elias came to listen.

He’d been here twenty-three years. The Institute forgot him long ago. Funding died in 2007. Upstairs, the old building had morphed into a boutique hotel, neon-lit and loud. But down here, Elias remained. Machines oiled, needles sharp, air dry. He played the cylinders as company, knowing the rhythm of each voice—the Skagit woman pausing before “river,” the tremble in the Tlingit elder’s naming song.

Then there was Cylinder 7.

No provenance. No notes. No date. Just a scrawled label: Ungava, dialect unknown. The wax was darker, almost black, warm under pressure like flesh. Played forward, it barely spoke—a low murmur, breath more than language, like wind through reeds or water over stone. No transcripts. No scholars. An orphan.

For years, Elias left it untouched. Too intimate. Too present. But lately, the silence above grew heavier. Machines faltered; needles skipped; voices fractured mid-word. He found himself drawn to Drawer 7, hand hovering as if pulled by a current.

One rainy evening, rain tapping narrow vents, he took it out.

The playback machine buzzed its familiar hum. He lowered the stylus. The murmur rolled—soft, soothing. He listened three times. Then, on impulse, reversed the playback.

The machine groaned; the motor strained—but it turned.

And the voice—if it was a voice—spoke backward.

Not garbled nonsense, but strange and clear. Syllables unwound like thread. Consonants shaped meaning, then dissolved again. Not language as he knew it, but deliberate. With grammar. Rhythm. Grief.

A fragment echoed in his mind:

“Ta-rew… ka-lin… sh’ka…”

Another lingered:

“Ni-vel… su-ra… kel-tah…”

He played it again. And again.

By the third time, he mouthed the sounds, tongue moving without thought. His voice faltered. “Water” twisted into “retaw,” then morphed into guttural clicks—a sound alien to English.

He stopped the machine.

The silence afterward was different—thicker. Waiting. Heavy with something unspoken.

—

He hadn’t planned to share it. But Miriam came the next week.

A linguist younger than him, early forties, eyes sharp, head tilted as if catching not just words, but shadows. Elias admired her paper on phonemic erosion in isolated dialects.

“You found something,” she said flatly.

He hesitated, then played Cylinder 7—forward, then reversed.

She sat still.

When it ended, she whispered, “That’s impossible.”

“It’s here.”

“It’s more than reversed. It’s inverted. The phonemes unravel backward—the voice is un-learning itself.”

Elias nodded. Hearing it aloud hit harder than sensing it alone. A cold knot tightened in his chest. Fear. Fascination. Grief.

Miriam scanned the shelves. “Where did you get this?”

He told her—Drawer 7, unknown dialect, years of silence. She listened, intensity growing.

“Do you know what this means?”

He shook his head.

“If this is real—if it sounds like this—it’s proof of a language that never existed. Or one that existed in reverse. It rewrites our understanding of speech.”

A shiver ran down Elias’s spine. He suspected something profound. This was different.

Miriam’s eyes lit up, almost awed. “We have to study it. Understand it.”

—

So they did.

Playing the cylinder forward and backward, transcribing sounds, mapping patterns. They brought in others—a phonetician, a cognitive linguist, a grad student skilled in acoustic modeling. The sub-basement buzzed with life, wax scent thick, machines humming.

But then things got strange.

Sophia, the quiet grad student, began stuttering. First a pause, then worse, until words tangled and twisted. They blamed stress—until her speech began inverting, mirroring the cylinder’s voice. Her eyes grew wide with fear. “It’s like the sounds are slipping away from—morf yawa gnippils era sdnuos eht ekil s’ti.”

Dr. Lee, the phonetician, woke to whispers in his sleep—words not his own, foreign and haunting.

Miriam saw visions—twisted trees, black water, landscapes vivid and real, then gone. She clutched her head, breath shallow. “It’s like the language is reaching into my mind.”

And Elias… he felt the language crawling inside, twisting his speech. Words slipped into strange shapes. The voice of Cylinder 7 whispered in his mind, guiding him.

One night, staring at the silent cylinder, Elias hesitated. His throat tightened, a surge of doubt and fear crashing against his curiosity. The room seemed to hold its breath with him.

Then, barely audible, he whispered back:

“Retaw… retaw…”

His voice cracked. The word hung in the thick air—waiting.

A shift, subtle but certain, rippled through the room.

And somewhere deep beneath, the cylinder pulsed again.

Waiting for his next word.

Raymond Brunell‘s fiction has appeared in Bluebird’s Scribe Review, Literary Garage, Moss Puppy Magazine, and Variety Pack, among others. His work explores memory, technology, and the spaces between human connection and digital preservation. He is currently working on a collection of speculative short stories.