Cartography of a Quiet Signal

In the library after hours, the scanners breathe, blue light combing the spines like a patient tide. Dust lifts in slow spirals, a private weather over the map of borrowed names.

Outside, the city hums in its copper cables. Buses kneel, doors sigh, rain glosses the street until every puddle is a satellite, holding the moon in a bent palm.

I follow a faint ping across my screen— a migrating thought that wants a home. It slips between servers, quiet as fern spores, settling where silence is kept on purpose.

By morning, the shelves look ordinary again, but the night has left a fine trace, a glitter of frequencies in the air that you can hear if you stand still.