The story of The Hush
The Hush is the long grass along the edge of the Sleepy Lake, and it is there for a reason nobody ever has to be told. The grass takes the wind, so the water does not have to. That is why the lake is a mirror. One place in the world is the cause of another one’s best feature, and a child never needs it explained — but the picture stops being arbitrary, and a place that is not arbitrary starts to feel real. It also gave the lake the one thing the lake was short of, which was a reason to be calm. Hush is pure breath. No voice in it, nothing to land on, and it is the one word in English that is both the sound a place makes and the thing you say. On grass it is simply literal: wind through leaves is the shush. The sound is the asset, too — leaves are broad and continuous and have no attack at all, which is the exact opposite of a bell, and a leaf-wash coming round every seventeen seconds over the Pools’ seven and eleven means nothing repeats for hours. It is tall slender blades standing straight up out of the water in clumps, all different heights, some of them arching over far enough to touch the surface, and you drift along a winding channel between them until it opens out. One soft breeze leans all of it one way. Everywhere else in this world, nothing moves. Here, the grass moves. And nothing lives in the Hush and nothing is hidden in it. It is soft furniture at the edge of the water, not cover.
Stories from The Hush
Nothing from here has been published yet. The Hush is still being filmed — the honest kind of gap, like the route’s “resident owed”.
In the archive
2 pieces of The Hush exist in the archive — 2 locations. They arrive here as they are approved and published.