A Lawsuit Against the Oysters

or “The Case of an Uncommitted Murder”

From the Archives of the Archangelic Court, Case No. 666-KLM

When the Poet signed a contract with the Celestial Chancellery for creative accompaniment, he was entitled, under the terms, to:
— a curator (one archangel licensed for inspiration),
— auxiliary fauna (a cat — for melancholy, a fox — for temptation),
— and a consultant on consequences (a temporarily seconded rabbit from Heavenly Wall Street — in charge of reasonable risk and internal PR).
They were meant to inspire, observe, and not interfere.
And everything went according to plan until the Poet became too inspired—
… and stopped sleeping, eating, and distinguishing real things from metaphors.
And then the investigation began.
“I repeat: the subject is a mortal poet, inspired to the point of coma,”
the Prosecutor was wearily leafing through the papers. He sighed without raising his eyes from the folder.
“Twenty four hours without sleep, eight hundred lines, one opera and… a play without dialogue. Title: Silence as a Form of Protest Against Rhyme.”
“Is he conscious?” Judge Setrahim slowly raised an eyebrow, as if weighing not only the question but the entire human race. Before him stood a cup of milk. Half full, though he hadn’t yet taken a single sip.
“Physically — yes,” the Prosecutor answered after a pause. He rummaged through the folder and pulled out a surveillance photo — grainy, grey: the Poet sat by the window, with a cup, a kettle, and an abyss in his gaze.
“Emotionally… he stares at the kettle and cries. For no reason.”
He lifted his eyes and added:
“And the case file also mentions: the poet, in his state of inspired coma, once filed a lawsuit against Silence — demanding that it return his inspiration. In the defendant column it read: the sea, oysters, and everything that hides pearls without reason.”
The document was deemed invalid but left in the Archive — as evidence of a case that cannot be, and yet keeps happening.
The Judge exhaled as if he had just been told the sun had decided to go on vacation.
“I see,” he leaned back with a quiet creak of the ancient chair.
“Who is under suspicion?”

Memories suddenly carried the Prosecutor into the Archive.
It was warm there. Not cozy—just warm, like a cup of milk.
It smelled of coffee, paper, and a little… tiredness.
The Prosecutor sat at a table, spreading the case files into two stacks: “clear” and “inevitable.” And then he entered. Or appeared unexpectedly. Or perhaps had been there all along—from the very beginning.
The Young Prosecutor.
Himself—thirty years younger. With a fringe, with a na;ve posture, with a face that had not yet been formatted by protocols.
“You’ve started to look like furniture,” said the Young Prosecutor, without malice.
“A secretary with wings. Almost a cupboard.”
“Disappear,” grumbled the Prosecutor and pretended to search for the right file. It was pointless: the right file was already in front of him.
“I can’t. You called me yourself. Somewhere between the case on exhaustion and the one where the cat broke the flow.
You remembered, didn’t you?”
“I just asked myself when we last believed a poet,” the Prosecutor said dryly.
“That’s when you showed up.”
The Young Prosecutor perched on the edge of the table, swinging his leg.
He wasn’t irritated. Only openly curious—like someone watching their future despair.
“And when was the last time you didn’t treat inspiration as a symptom?” he asked.
“You call it a coma.
What if it’s enlightenment—just without the certificate?”
“He hasn’t eaten in three days. He called the microwave a myth. He typed up a drama without characters.”
“You’re just afraid,” said the Young Prosecutor.
“If you admit he’s healthy, it means you’re the sick one.”
The Prosecutor stayed silent. He stared at his cup.
A crack crossed its wall diagonally—thin and old, like a scar.
He couldn’t remember whether he had ever poured anything into it—or whether it had simply been a decoration, left behind from his former self.
The cup had stood on the table for so many years it had become part of the furniture. No one touched it. Not even him.
Sometimes he would brush it lightly with his finger—just to make sure it was still whole.
Sometimes he wanted to smash it.
To test whether he was capable of destroying at least something of his own free will.
But the cup remained.
“You’ve always been unbearable,” he said softly.
“I was you,” the Young Prosecutor replied.
“Before you started passing sentences instead of understanding.”
They sat like that for a while.
The lamp in the Archive hummed, wires flickered overhead, and everything seemed temporary—like inspiration. Unconfirmed.
“Do you know what’s the scariest part?” asked the Prosecutor.
“What?”
“I miss you,” he said.
“But if you came to me for a job interview—I wouldn’t hire you.”
The Young Prosecutor smiled. Sadly. Like the smile in a poem that no one will ever write. He stood up and, walking between the shelves, disappeared.
Not with a flourish.
Just—like a line deleted without saving the draft.

The Prosecutor was back in the courtroom again. Before him—the Poet’s case file.
On the margins—a blot. Coffee? Ink? Or… something third.
He didn’t wipe it away, simply opened the next page, tapped his finger on the list, and spoke as if reading names off gravestones:
“Archangel-curator. One cat. A fox. And a rabbit.”
“From Heavenly Wall Street,” the Rabbit added quietly, not raising his head.
He sat with his paws clasped like a financier at the moment of collapse.
His voice was even, almost philosophical:
“It’s no longer branding. It’s a diagnosis.”
For a moment, the pause hung taut in the room—like a caffeine IV.
“Let’s start with the Archangel,” said the Judge, and there was a faint note of inevitability in his voice—
as if he already knew:
this would end either in a poem or a catastrophe.

Archangel Benjamin rose, lowering his wings. There were traces of chalk and paper on them. In his hands— a notebook.
“I gave him a thought. One.
A big one,” the Archangel lowered his gaze, as if still holding it in his palm.
“To move something. To shake him.
So that he would understand what he was capable of.”
He slowly ran his hand over the notebook lying on the table before him, without opening it.
“I didn’t know he was already at the edge.”
The Judge leaned forward slightly:
“And what was that thought?”
Benjamin looked out the window, where clouds reflected— as though he were searching for the answer there before speaking:
“That poetry does not have to be useful.”
His voice trembled barely perceptibly, like a quill over a blank page.
“That it can be deliberately useless— and still exist.
Simply because— yes.”
He fell silent.
Only then— slowly, with almost prayerful caution— he added:
“He wrote it down. As his first line.”
Suddenly Benjamin’s memory carried him to his first day.
That morning he had read the instructions twice, dusted his feathers with chalk, cleared his workspace of doubt, and promised himself not to rush. He was nervous— not because he was unprepared, but because he knew: no one is ever ready for the first Thought.
They handed it to him in a glass capsule.
The capsule glowed softly from within, as if it were thinking by itself.
The mentor said:
“One. Do not comment. Do not interpret.
Just deliver it.”
“To whom?” whispered Benjamin.
“To the Universe. And it will deliver it to whomever it deems necessary.”
Benjamin took the capsule. It was lighter than he expected—like a soap bubble holding the entire truth, without quotation marks, without footnotes. Just essence.
He carried it through the archive gallery, past the halls of the timeless, where the walls were built of unwritten paragraphs. He could already see the spot where he was to place the Thought— on a pedestal, under the flow of inspiration.
And then…
A tail.
A thin black tail.
Not his.
A cat’s.
The Cat crossed the passage with the air of a creature that had never fallen from heaven because it had always lived under the couch. Benjamin flinched.
The capsule swayed.
Slipped.
A soft click.
The Thought shattered.
Not into shards— into fragments of meaning.
Each fragment now spoke of something different: one about how boring it is to be important, another about the fact that the reader exists, a third simply laughed for no reason.
Benjamin froze.
Then sank to his knees.
He gathered everything.
Glued it together as best he could.
He delivered the result.
The mentor looked at it.
Said nothing.
Later, the Protocol recorded in his personal file:
“The delivered Thought acquired a fragmentary structure and irony.
Deemed usable.
Genre definition: postmodern.
Subject to experimental application on poets, editors, and directors.”
It sounded almost emotionless—like a diagnosis written in ink but signed with doubt.
Since then Benjamin carried a notebook with him. He no longer trusted his memory.
He opened it rarely, only when the trembling inside grew stronger than the tremor in his feathers.
He leafed through it like a prayer book, unsure if anyone was listening.
The Judge took the notebook Benjamin offered him as if it were evidence.
Gently, with two fingers— as though he knew: thoughts can be fragile.
He placed it on the table.
And at that moment a slip of paper fell out of it.
Thin, like the breath before inspiration.
He picked it up. Smoothed it out.
Read it aloud:
“I have no arguments.
I have watercolors, a burnt finger, and the smell of ink.
That is enough.”
For a moment no one moved.
The Judge said nothing.
He simply held the slip of paper a little tighter— and placed it next to the notebook.
Silence fell.
Without pathos.
As if the air itself had become a heavy pause.

It filled the entire courtroom—
thick and wordless,
like the anticipation at the end of a paragraph where a continuation should be, but hasn’t arrived yet.
No one looked at each other.
The Archangel’s wings trembled slightly, like pages fluttering in the wind.
The Rabbit sat in his corner, unmoving, as though he already knew how it would all end.
Only his gaze grew a little sharper—like someone who had calculated all the consequences, yet still hoped for one unexpected twist.
He clasped his paws—carefully, almost like a prayerful gesture, as though holding something invisible between them:
statistics, hope, or both at once.
Then he tilted his head slightly—
not downward, but inward,
toward those calculations and diagrams long stored in memory.
The Rabbit did not like to interfere.
His work was to understand:
what was the probability of inspiration, how many lines would survive, how many would fall.
And where in that equation there was room for pain.
He was not a consultant—
he was the residual intellect of a feeling that had tried too many times to justify itself.
Sometimes he dreamed of formulas.
Sometimes—of lines that never existed.
Sometimes he thought he did not exist at all,
but had simply been assigned to the case as a mandatory footnote for risk management.
But today he felt: this was real.
Not like in a meeting,
not like in the Protocol,
not like in a model with a confidence interval,
not like the Protocol wanted it to be.
Something in the room shifted—
not the furniture, not the air.
Inside.
A blow—not loud, but precise.
As if one of the formulas he had thought universal suddenly refused to work.
As if inspiration, usually unpredictable, had agreed for a moment to be honest.
He didn’t flinch.
Only blinked.
Slowly.
Once.
And that was enough to understand:
No metrics could ever explain why all this mattered.
The Fox, sitting nearby, slightly turned,
wrapping herself in silence with a flick of her tail,
and leaned forward ever so slightly.
Her gaze was sideways—
not from shame, but from a weary sense of foreboding.
As though she knew:
what was about to begin could not be avoided.
But it could—
be endured with dignity.
She was the first to sense the danger—
not as a victim,
but as someone used to feeling the threat long before the Protocol appeared.
She crossed her paws in front of her—
unhurriedly, almost elegantly.
Not in an attempt to protect herself,
but as though she wanted to hold time by the scruff for one more second
before it turned into a verdict.
Like an actress who knows:
the next line is hers,
but there is still half a breath of silence
in which she can remain herself.
As though one question asked right now could change the scene
while the curtain had not yet begun to move.
While the sentence had not yet taken shape in words,
but was already breathing somewhere nearby—
through skin, fur, and voice.
Her voice was even, not accusatory—
rather tired.
But there was a metal edge of alertness in it,
like someone who had already seen the final edits in the drafts of fate:
“What about the Editor?” asked the Fox.
The Judge looked at the Prosecutor.
He silently nodded and turned on the recording.
On the screen—the Editor from the future.
He stood by the Poet’s bed.
Suit, glasses, an IV in his hands.
He spoke:
“It’s not poison.
It’s just inspiration
without protection.
Without insurance.
Without the possibility of forgetting.
I… I didn’t want to kill him.
I wanted him to be purer.
Purer than me.”
“He will still edit.
But if you let him feel—
just once—
that it’s possible to be whole…
maybe he won’t break after that.
Or maybe he will.
I’m not God.
I’m an editor.
I simply believe in second chances.”
The screen went dark.
The Judge was silent for a long time.
He touched the cup on the table.
Glass.
Handleless.
Half empty.
Almost like himself.
The courtroom changed.
Everything was shrouded in mist.
Even the Prosecutor vanished,
as if evaporating into the paragraphs.
Setrahim remained alone.
He sat there, not pretending to think.
He was simply remembering.

Once—long ago, in an era when inspiration was not yet registered as a phenomenon—
he too had written.
Badly.
Slowly.
Too many adjectives.
And far too little faith in himself.
But he wrote.
Without a plan, without feedback, without style.
Only with one thing—
the fear that it was needed by no one.
And the hope that, maybe, it was.
He left food untouched, refused sleep, waited for the muse as one waits for the return of a friend.
Sometimes she came.
Sometimes—it was the wrong one.
Then he thought: writing means passing judgment on yourself.
And now…
Now he was sitting in the courtroom—under the control of the Protocol, where the poet was in a coma, the archangel with a notebook, the fox—stripped of her fox like allure, the rabbit with analytics, and the cat—with guilt.
All of it already recorded by the Prosecutor in a form no one had ever read.
And he understood: there is no court.
There is only the attempt.
There are those who write, and those who do not dare.
Judge Setrahim stood, looking at the courtroom, where the figures were now emerging.
The mist dispersed slowly.
Not defendants—
participants in the experiment called inspiration.
IV lines, cups, wings, tails—everything froze in anticipation.
As if every line the Judge was about to speak had long been inside him—
and now demanded to be released.
He began to speak.
“My sentence is:
The Poet—alive.”
(He paused. The word hung there,
like a breath that finally managed to happen.)
“The Editor—leaves. Without applause.”
(Because not every scene needs a curtain call.)
“The Archangel—go to beginning authors.”
(Where every mistake is a seed.)
“The Cat—temporarily suspended from interfering with the flow.”
(Until he learns to touch meaning without erasing it, even in love.)
“The Fox—into the program for the protection of creative individuals, without the right to tempt.”
(Because even temptation grows tired of its role.)
The Fox closed her eyes and imagined walking down a corridor.
Not a physical one—this corridor existed in memory, in that place where there were no walls,
only wallpaper made of the past and footsteps you could hear but hadn’t taken.
She walked barefoot. Heels would have been a fake there.
Sometimes the corridor showed her scenes:
The Poet, seeing her for the first time on the stairwell of inspiration;
The Cat, watching her with suspicion, as if knowing—there was nothing soft about her except the fur;
The Archangel, turning away because she too often quoted the Gospel in the tone of a marketer.
She passed all of it without stopping.
“I was never meant for temptation,” she whispered softly.
To no one.
Just to herself.
Or to the Protocol, which listened from the shadows.
“I was meant to test resilience.
It’s just… the word is too convenient.
It takes the blame away from those who gave up.”
Her voice did not tremble.
It was like glass: transparent, but cutting.
As a child she had thought she would be a muse.
Later—she believed she would become a trap.
Now she knew: she was an instrument.
Not inspiring.
Testing.
Like the wind testing the walls.
Like darkness testing the lamp.
The corridor ended in a mirror.
In it—her own reflection.
Only without the tail, without the mannerisms, without the hints.
The Fox looked at the reflection.
There, behind the glass, was her silhouette—slightly ghostly, slightly straighter than usual.
It smiled.
Almost encouragingly.
For the first time in a long time she did not smile back.
She simply nodded.
To herself.
Or to the one left on the other side of inspiration.

“The Rabbit… stays,” the Judge continued.
He paused.
And as though for the first time during the entire trial—
he did not look at the papers, did not cite the Protocol,
but simply looked at the Rabbit.
The Rabbit sat as unmoving as before, his paws clasped as if holding something fragile between them—
a remnant of meaning, or a tiny probability of understanding.
“Why?” asked the Fox.
And this time her voice was not a game, not pretense, not a test of someone else’s resilience.
It was quiet.
Almost—human.
The Judge looked at her.
For a long time.
And suddenly—winked.
Not like a judge.
Not like a celestial bureaucrat.
But like someone who had once sat by a window with an empty cup—
and waited for a line,
like someone who had once written, too.
“Because someone has to stay…,” said the Judge, tilting his head slightly,
“even after the finale.
To observe.
To remember that all this was not a form, but an attempt.
He does not interfere.
He does not decide.
But he records what cannot be described.
Sometimes that is enough.”
The Rabbit did not nod.
But his paws clasped tighter—
as though agreeing.
Or gently holding the pause.

The Judge turned his gaze to the Cat.
“From now on—only paws on the keys.
Not a single tail in the document.”
The Cat did not answer.
He only blinked slowly—
as those do who forgive.
Or understand.
The Judge sat down.
Not as a judge.
As an author who has finally placed the last period—
and suddenly realized:
everything that needed to be said
had already been said.
He looked at his cup of milk.
But now—it didn’t matter.
Because the story had ended.
And inspiration—remained.
The Cat let out a short:
“mrrr…”
And neither agreed nor sighed.
At first he simply observed.
Exactly as he had been hired to do—
an observer, a companion,
a keeper of melancholy and
wool covered presence in the creative process.
Sitting on the edge of the Poet’s table,
he warmed the notebook with his body
and occasionally purred
in time with the lines being typed.
It was a union without words—
just breathing, keys, and tea.
And then…
He decided to help.
Or rather—he simply stretched.
First with a paw—
to check the stability of the glass.
Then… with his tail.
The tail was long, proud, and uncontrollable—
as befits a poetic symbol.
It lay across the keyboard—
softly, accidentally,
as though it wanted to touch the meaning.
The screen flickered.
The Cat froze.
Twenty three paragraphs disappeared from the monitor.
Unsaved.
Unprotected.
Just born—
and already buried.
The Cat jumped off the table.
Then returned.
Sat in front of the screen.
Meowed.
Quietly.
Once.
Then again.
In different intonations—
a question,
an apology,
a plea.
He pawed at the monitor,
as if he could bring the words back
by rubbing it the right way.
As if he could wipe time off the screen.
He sat there half the day.
Sometimes left—
then returned again.
As though hoping
the words would forgive.
That the Poet would say:
“It’s okay… you’re a cat.”
But the Poet was silent.
And the Cat kept meowing.
Until he exhausted himself.
Until he became—
just silence with whiskers and a tail.
The courtroom grew quiet.
Only two remained.
The Judge turned to the Rabbit.
Slowly.
No longer with a verdict—
with curiosity.
“And you, Rabbit?” the Judge asked softly.
“Why did you stay?”
The Rabbit shrugged:
“I just…
want to know how all this ends.”
The Judge nodded.
And finally took a sip.
The milk was warm.

Somewhere below, on Earth,
the Poet was making tea.
The Poet was a little boy.
He was six, maybe seven—
but in that kitchen, age didn’t count.
He sat on a stool,
propping his chin in his hands,
and watched as his grandfather put the kettle on.
A round kettle,
with a black handle
from which the paint had long since worn away,
leaving only metal and its smell.
“Do you hear?” asked the grandfather, not turning around.
“What?” whispered the boy.
The kettle hissed.
Not just boiling—
it was speaking.
Quietly, with pauses,
as though composing a story while it heated.
“It’s speaking to you,” said the grandfather.
“Not to me.
I heard mine long ago.
Now it’s your turn.”
“What is it saying?” asked the boy.
“Listen for yourself,” replied the grandfather.
“Words aren’t always written with letters.
Sometimes—with steam.”
The boy didn’t understand.
But he felt it.
He listened.
And then, for the first time in his life,
he realized
that silence was also an answer.
The Poet took a pencil
and drew a kettle on a piece of paper.
It turned out crooked,
but with eyes.
Like someone who speaks—
even if no one listens.
Beneath the drawing
he wrote a line—
the first in many days:
“The kettle sings,
as if it knows
that I am still here.”

The end