short fiction · 2026-10-07

The Quiet Between Walls

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

In the empty school, where rows of desks once held laughter, a hush settled over the cracked linoleum. Each footfall was swallowed, leaving only the faint tick of a distant clock. The silence did not erase the past; it pressed it into the gaps between breaths, allowing forgotten details to surface like breaths that slip through a throat long closed. When I later returned, the memory of my own name felt sharper, as if the emptiness had amplified it. In those quiet corridors, what we remember is not the loudest events, but the spaces left unspoken.