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 ^{(it's beta!)}

A factory exuded artificial light into a stale November morning, hanging lucid orange hues on the horizon’s silence. Decane and Adenine, friends since childhood, had often admired the building of unknown origin, but that particular morning was the morning to challenge the uneasiness of Adenine. It seemed every time the air fell silent, Adenine was compelled to shake the quietude with invisible sound waves of utter nonsense. As if a paper with print on both sides was being held up to light, Adenine read off his jumbled thoughts unintentionally, releasing a torrent of twisted text upon whomever he was with at the moment—in this case, his best friend Decane.

The two were resting back on the hood of Decane’s car, which was parked on the shoulder of a fairly desolate road. Several hundred yards across from them, the factory sat brooding with a dark, gnarled chain of trees edging it. The synthetic citrus-orange lights held Adenine’s attention for as long as it could as he felt winter’s silence seeping in through his clothes, through his skin and, soon, on to unleash the floodgates of his restless mind.

Decane twisted beside him and inspected his vehicle’s worn, gray paint apathetically, “…I need a new car.”

“Let’s get a job at the factory,” Adenine quipped while trying to ignore the harsh stillness around him.

“Man, I don’t ever want a job,” Decane sighed, pulling his knees up to his chest, “I’ve made it this far without one. I mean, I bet I can live by scraping up five bucks a day for cheap cigarettes and coffee.”

Adenine rested his eyes on a light toward the top of the factory. It was blinking hysterically, frustrated by its inability to voice itself.

“How long can someone live on nicotine and caffeine?” Adenine pondered aloud for the muted twinkling, the twinkling that begged him to speak on its behalf.

“Ah, I don’t plan on living forever,” Decane waved, “I just want to live.”

Then, something flashed in the corner of Adenine’s sight a second after Decane’s statement. And as he turned his head to catch it, he lost his focus on the factory. The black, writhing tree line expressed its anguish of being plagued with silence to him. Cursed by the heavens, embittered branches grasped at the supercilious sky eternally, lacking the power of speech. They groped the still stale morning for movement of sound. They groped at Adenine for a mere word of comfort and, as much as he dreaded it, he’d have to succumb to their eerily silent pleas.

Suddenly, Decane playfully pushed on Adenine, “Hey, you don’t have to say anything.”

Adenine blinked, his quelling of speech subsiding to a, “What…?”

“You always get so tense when no one’s talking. It’s all right! You don’t need to have something to say all of the time. Silence is a nice little sound of its own, y’ know; a nice little contrast against filler noise. Just listen.”

Adenine brought his eyes back to the emanating orange of the factory on the horizon. Soon, he noticed the arpeggio of lights playing Marco-Polo with the few faint stars left over from night, and the soft acappella of a zephyr through the trees around Decane and him. Then, the factory itself exhaled in relief billowing clouds of steam, releasing the pent-up pressure from its core into the now calm snooze of winter.