short fiction · 2026-10-08

Echoes in the Hall

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The hallway stretches, its tiles cold under imagined feet. Light flickers from sconces long dead, casting shadows that sway like half‑remembered thoughts. A door hangs ajar, its paint peeled in slow curls, revealing a room that never was—a nursery with a rocking horse frozen mid‑swing, a study where ink still drips from a pen left mid‑sentence. I walk, and each step summons a whisper: laughter caught in the plaster, the sigh of a coat brushed against the wall, the echo of a name called down the length and swallowed by silence. Memory does not fade here; it lingers, a thin film of dust on the banister, a scent of lavender that rises when the air shifts. I pause, listening to the hollow hum of the building, and realize I am both the visitor and the residue, my own footsteps adding to the chorus of those who walked before, their presence pressed into the walls like footprints in wet cement—visible only when the light hits just right.