She felt the silence drop over the train carriage, it is unusual to feel the absence of noise, but her toes curled and jaw clenched as all noise disappeared. She certainly felt something.

It wasnt unusual for this to happen in her town, the trains would switch off going past residential areas late at night, and briefly would only be powered by momentum. It was unusual however for her to feel and hear the silence, she had left her headphones at home, usually she wouldn’t even notice unless the lights went off.

There weren’t many people in her carriage, a man down the end asleep against the window, a woman two seats down watching something on her phone and a teenage girl down the other end staring out the window blankly with her head phones in.

It was stiflingly silent, it felt as though the air pressure dropped and that her ears would pop, it was too quiet for even her ears to ring.

In that moment she dare not breath, and fracture the silence that had her smothered, she was fairly sure her heart even paused.

It amazed her that she had not felt the silence before, she glanced around the others in the carriage, all unaware of the fact that their entire environment around them had shifted drastically.

There was no squeak of the train wheels, uncomfortable seats, or the soles of shoes on the linoleum floor.

The air felt heavier, as it was carrying the weight of all the noises around her, and she shivered in the presence of nothing.

The silence was deafening, and she wondered how anyone could hear anything else over its noise.