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Cherry Street Coffee House
There was a great silence over the land.
By silence it is meant that it was sort of a nothingness, as opposed to just something not making noise, as there might have been some noise, but the sort of noise you're used to and don't tend to notice.
And this silence wasn't relegated to any specific animal or thing that could potentially be poignant by being silent, but it applied to everything. Except those things that weren't silent but were the sort of things you wouldn't notice unless they were. And so they weren't. Noticed.
Which made the place seem all that much more empty and silent.
Despite any odd feelings of contradiction you might harbour by the description explicitly saying that there may have been things making noise it was, in fact, incredibly quiet. Granted, it might have been a louder silence than most people were used to, but it was very very quiet. Just the sort of quiet in which you expect your mobile phone to go off in, scaring the hell out of yourself, even though you half expected it, and possibly aided by the fact that you'd forgotten that you'd changed your ringtone again, and it now played 'Tiptoe through the Tulips' at a pretty impressive decibel rate. Which can also happen in the cinema, where it isn't terribly silent at all, not even after they flash something at you telling you to make sure your mobile phone is turned off. This wasn't the cinema, though. And no mobile phones rang, with any kind of ringtone. Which is why it'd be so scary if one did, all of a sudden.
The land was much more silent than any other silence you might imagine with all the things you expect to be making noise not making noise, which would just cause you to comment, "My, isn't it quiet? Where are those little chirpy things that normally chirp and such, I believe it might be grasshoppers, or perhaps locusts, though I'm almost sure it's not locusts, normally, I just can't seem to think of any other kind of thing that might make that chirping noise, and no, no, I'm not thinking of birds, though they're not chirping either, I notice, but I was thinking of a distinctly insect-type of chirping, or perhaps the sound of some animals that liked to scratch about in the dirt scratching about in the dirt, I don't hear any of that, I don't think, though my ears have been bad lately, haven't they, don't hear the telephone ringing most times these days," and that wouldn't be very quiet at all, really.
If someone had been listening when the silence actaully first fell over the land they might have commented on how quiet it had just gone, such would the difference between before the silence fell and after it had finished falling, but the silence was well-laid over the land like a thick jam spread with plenty of seeds without tearing the bread beneath and leaving a very pleasingly spread piece of bread with jam on it. The silence even seemed to stick slightly to anyone that passed through the land like they'd just touched the jam with a knuckle while picking up the bread, and now were destined to spend the rest of the day leaving sticky prints on every single thing they touched. The comparison between jam and the silence ended there, largely, despite the potentially lucrative market in selling jars of silence to parents. It was, however, just an analogy, and there was no obvious way to jar the silence. It would probably involve machinery, and despite the tremendous advances in technology these days, the machinery was bound to make some degree of noise, and that was likely going to have some effect on putting the silence in jars.
After a while the person sitting on the grass under the tree got up and took their book elsewhere. Somewhere there weren't so many mosquitos and running commentary about the silence.
disclaimer:
The serial will be back... this, in case you weren't paying attention, wasn't a part of the serial.
Unless there was a great silence in the serial... which there wasn't, they were still in the pub.
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