short fiction · 2026-10-30

The Dig Unspeaks

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The philologist stops speaking. The dig reverses.

Mother refolds into méh₂tēr, the breath returning to the lung that first shaped it. Ghost unsummons gást, the spirit settling back into the wound it haunted. Window reseals into vindauga, wind-eye blinking shut against the centuries. Salary dissolves into salt, grains slipping through Roman fingers, unpaid, unearned. Nightmare releases the sleeper; the mare gallops backward into Proto-Germanic dark, unburdening the chest.

Each word a shovel. Each silence the hole refilling.

The philologist's mouth, now empty, holds only the taste of dust — dust, from dūst, from dheu-, to rise in a cloud. The cloud rises. The dig never happened. The ghosts were never there. The mouth closes on silere, and the earth is flat again.