He had always thought violence announced itself. A raised voice. A slammed door. A bruise that needed explaining. That was how it was supposed to look—obvious, theatrical, easy to condemn.
What he hadn’t learned, until much later, was how quiet violence could be.
This was the violence that arrived without urgency. It didn’t rush. It waited. It sat across the table, nodded politely, passed the salt. It dressed itself as responsibility, restraint, even kindness. No one flinched when it entered the room because it made no noise.
Silence, for example, rarely appears on any list of harms. It’s tidy. Respectable. Often praised. Silence means control. Maturity. Strength. But silence can starve. It withholds oxygen from conversations that need to breathe. It lets questions rot unanswered. It turns intimacy into an administrative function—present, efficient, devoid of warmth.
There are marriages that are not broken, not volatile, not even unhappy in the obvious sense. They simply stop registering. Desire fades, not because it was crushed, but because it was never acknowledged. No blows are struck. No cruel words spoken. Just an endless withholding that no one knows how to name.
This kind of violence thrives because it refuses the costume people expect. It doesn’t look like cruelty. It looks like normal life is continuing without incident. And because there is no visible wound, the victim often learns to doubt themselves. If nothing happened, why does it hurt?
Systems understand this well. They are designed to. Procedures remove touch. Rules dissolve accountability. Harm becomes an outcome of compliance rather than intent. “I followed protocol” replaces “I chose this.” Violence spreads best when no single person feels responsible for it.
In stories, monsters rage. They break things. They make themselves obvious. But the most dangerous figures are the ones who never raise their voice. The ones who act calmly, who explain their reasoning, who believe themselves moral because nothing looks extreme.
They are often praised for their restraint.
This is where fiction becomes useful—not because it exaggerates violence, but because it clarifies it. It shows how harm can be inflicted with steady hands and a quiet mind. Cruelty doesn’t always arrive screaming. Sometimes it arrives organised.
By the time anyone notices, the damage is complete. And still, no one knows where to point.
Because how do you accuse something that never looked like an attack?
That is the violence people fail to recognise.
Not because it is rare—but because it is familiar.
–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
Love, lust, and lies collide on land and water. A temptress, a faithful wife, and a photographer haunted by shadows drift into a world of seduction, betrayal, and control.
Marriages unravel, secrets surface, and civility dissolves into primal instinct. Nothing is safe. No one is innocent.
eBook is available for instant download by clicking here.
SEETHINGS (first in the series) is downloadable and free for a limited time, here.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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