天美影音AV

“Maybe there is a beast... maybe it's only us.”

— William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“The greatest mistake is to do nothing because you can only do a little.”

— Edmund Burke

A quiet town cradled in a valley, where the hills rolled softly and the days passed gently. It was comfortable. Predictable. Safe.

Each rooftop bore a siren; vestiges of an older, tenser time. They were wired to a tower on the highest hill, built to wail at the first sign of danger: fire, flood, invasion, anything that called for urgency, anything that dared disturb the stillness.

But as the years slipped by, like sand through lazy fingers, the sirens were heard less. Not because the world had grown safer, but because the people had stopped listening.

At first, they’d glance out their windows when the alarms blared. Then came the shrugs. The slow shake of heads. Eventually, they asked the council to turn them down—just a little, just enough to sleep through. They were too loud, too jarring, too disruptive to the gentle rhythm of their lives. A relic, they called it. A nuisance. Besides, what did the town really have to fear? The hills were tranquil, the air sweet, the life slow.

The townspeople grew comfortable, wrapped in the warm, familiar quiet of their routines. They tended their gardens. They swept their porches. They passed one another on morning walks with polite nods and soft smiles. The bakery opened at dawn; the post arrived by noon; the church bells chimed on Sundays without fail.

Everything stayed exactly where it had always been.

The sirens became little more than background ornaments, disregarded by choice. The elders, who remembered their voices, no longer spoke of them. Even children stopped asking what they were for.

The tower watched in silence. And though no one looked up anymore, it kept blinking steadily, patiently, into the starless night, like an eye no one dared meet.

One morning, a plume of smoke appeared on the horizon, a thread of gray above the northern woods. It smeared the sky like an accusation.

Some townsfolk climbed the hill and peered into the distance. They whispered. They wondered. But mostly, they dismissed it, even as the sirens blared hour after hour.

“It’s probably nothing,” they said.

Soon, the animals began to vanish; birds no longer sang at dawn, deer no longer grazed at the tree line. The river darkened, donning a cloak of mourning. Coughs lingered in the air longer than they should have. No one stirred.

“Someone’s handling it,” the townspeople murmured, eyes on their work, their dinners, their lives.

“It’s not our job to worry.”

“We’re too busy to care.”

A few stood in the square, raising their voices, holding signs, begging for attention. They were met with sighs and sidelong glances.

“Always complaining,” the others scoffed. “They just want to attract attention. Everything is fine. Why can’t they just fall in line and ignore it like the rest of us?”

So the warnings faded into background noise. The signs came down, tossed aside like litter. The voices quieted, hoarse from repetition. Some walked away, hollow-eyed, tired, and discouraged. Some gave up entirely. Some kept speaking, even when it felt like screaming into a void.

And when the fire finally reached the edge of the town, hungry, relentless, licking at fences, curling beneath doorframes, it was already too late.

The people ran, unprepared, barefoot, confused, clutching what they could as smoke clawed at the sky.

“Why didn’t anyone tell us?” they cried. “Why didn’t someone do something?”

But someone had.

The sirens had once screamed.

The tower had once warned.

People had once spoken.

But comfort had drowned out courage. Noise had replaced action. And the town, willfully, sleepily, had chosen silence.