When I was a little boy, Kym had heard the lies that adults told themselves to sleep.
Not the small ones—the white lies about bedtime or vegetables or lost toys—but the heavy ones, the ones that settled in the walls like damp, that clung to breath and stained the air long after the words were spoken. He heard the father say I didn’t mean to while his knuckles were still split from the punch that sent his wife stumbling into the kitchen cabinet. He heard the teacher murmur She’s just sensitive as she turned away from the girl with the black eye and the too-quiet voice. He heard the deacon sigh Boys will be boys after the choir rehearsal where a twelve-year-old didn’t come back for his coat.
Kym didn’t understand them then—not fully. But he felt their weight. The way the house would hold its breath after a lie was spoken. The way silence would thicken, not with peace, but with complicity.
He was six when he first realized that truth had a sound.
It wasn’t in the words people said, but in what they didn’t. In the tremor before a denial. In the too-quick laugh that followed a confession no one was supposed to hear. In the way a mother’s voice would break on the word fine when she wasn’t fine at all.
By eight, he had stopped asking questions. Questions invited more lies. Instead, he listened. He sat in corners, under tables, behind half-open doors, and let the world reveal itself in its unguarded moments. He learned that cruelty often wore kindness like a coat it could take off when no one was looking. That power didn’t always shout—it often whispered, smiling, while it tightened its grip.
By ten, he knew the difference between a scream and a silence that screamed louder.
He never told anyone what he heard. Who would believe a child who claimed to know the shape of a man’s guilt by the way he stirred his coffee? So he carried it. All of it. The unspoken abuses, the buried shames, the quiet violence that never made the news but ruined lives just the same. Read my sci-fi blog: https://pepeperezblogoudepersonne.blogspot.com/
#SciFi #Thriller #KymMûryer
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