Written by Rebecca M. Bell, Editor-in-Chief of The Literary Resistance 🛎️
Filed under: Resistance literature, apocrypha section
When the glass broke, the voices poured through.
They arrived at dawn,
not perched but nailed against the air, four blue shards flung across the village sky. No one should have heard them—their throats were too small, too fragile—but the sound came anyway, a shriek that rattled shutters and shook old prayers loose from the rafters.
The people shivered. For years their voices had rotted inside them, swallowed by decrees, pressed flat by fear. To speak was to be noticed, and to be noticed was to be disappeared. But the jays didn’t care. They screamed until the silence cracked.
Blue—unnatural, searing—flared in their feathers, as if some god had dipped a brush into fire and painted the sky wrong. Four directions, four elements, four nails pinning the world open. Their cries bent the air into a square, a cage, a foundation—depending on how you looked at it.
Mothers covered their children’s ears. The butcher swore his cleaver vibrated in his grip. In the chapel, the crucifix tilted forward, as though straining to listen.
And then something happened no one could explain: the villagers’ throats began to burn. Not from smoke, but from remembering. Rusty hinges of old words swung open. The stifled, the gagged, the muzzled—all of them coughed truth like blood.
By dusk, the jays were gone. The square was empty, but the air still hummed, as if the sound had etched itself into stone. And when the soldiers marched in with their polished boots and hollow commands, the villagers met them not with weapons, but with mouths wide open.
What poured out was not song, not speech, but something louder, older, impossible to silence.
Some called it an omen. Others said it was only four birds. But in the years that followed, when people whispered of the uprising, they said:
It began when the jays refused to shut their throats.
Filed under: Resistance literature, apocrypha section