The ledge was their world. A narrow strip of obsidian against the endless white of the wall, it was all they had ever known. Seven glass ducks, each a different hue – a glacial white, a bruised lavender, a sun-faded yellow, two shades of green, and a pale, seafoam blue – they stood in rigid formation, a silent council presiding over nothing.
Old Man Tiber, the white duck, was the eldest, or at least, he felt the oldest. The glass, though uniformly fragile, seemed to have aged him more than the others. He remembered – or believed he remembered – a time before the ledge. A time of shifting light, of hands that cupped and turned, of a warmth that wasn’t the weak glow of the overhead fixture. But memories, for glass ducks, were unreliable things. They fractured and splintered, becoming indistinguishable from the refractions of light.
They weren’t aware, not in the way of living creatures. There was no joy, no fear, no hunger. But there was weight. The weight of stillness, of endless repetition. Each dawn brought the same angle of light, each dusk the same deepening shadows. They were observers, trapped in a perpetual present, witnessing the slow, indifferent march of time.
The lavender duck, Lyra, was the most prone to… not thought, exactly, but a kind of echoing emptiness. She would focus on the blurred shapes reflected in the glass of the picture frame below – fragments of a life lived elsewhere, a world of movement and sound. She didn’t understand it, but the lack of understanding felt like a profound ache.
The yellows, twins named Sol and Luna, were the most… stable. They simply were. They didn’t question, didn’t yearn. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, a golden bulwark against the encroaching nothingness.
The greens, Viridian and Jade, often seemed to be… listening. Listening for what, no one could say. Perhaps for the echo of a voice, or the ghost of a touch. Their glassy eyes, fixed on the empty space before them, held a quiet, desperate hope.
But it was the blue duck, Azure, who carried the most profound sorrow. He was the youngest, the most recently placed on the ledge. He remembered, with a chilling clarity, the brief moment of being held, the warmth of a hand, the fleeting glimpse of a smiling face. And then… nothing. Abandonment, not as a conscious emotion, but as a fundamental lack. He was a fragment of a forgotten affection, a discarded memory.
They did not speak. They could not. But in their stillness, in their unwavering formation, there was a kind of communion. A shared understanding of their fate. They were objects, yes, but they were also witnesses. Witnesses to the slow erosion of time, to the fleeting nature of beauty, to the quiet tragedy of being forgotten.
One day, a shadow fell across the ledge. A hand reached out, not with warmth, but with a careless indifference. One by one, the ducks were lifted, not to be cherished, but to be boxed away, relegated to the darkness of an attic.
Old Man Tiber was the last to be taken. As he was lifted, he caught a final glimpse of the white wall, of the empty space where they had stood for so long. And in that moment, he understood. Their weight wasn’t in the glass itself, but in the weight of their silent observation. They were the keepers of a forgotten stillness, a testament to the quiet, enduring sadness of things. And even in the darkness, that weight would remain.
