short fiction · 2026-10-08

Echoes in the Quiet

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The hallway stretched long and dim, its tiles polished to a faint sheen that swallowed sound. Mara walked slowly, each step a soft press against the stone, and listened. When she was certain the corridors were empty—no distant hum of conversation, no faint breath behind a door—her footsteps rang out, clear and reverberating, bouncing off the walls as if the architecture itself leaned in to hear her. She smiled, feeling the echo as a private conversation with the building, a confirmation that she was alone yet acknowledged.

But the moment she imagined a listener—perhaps the night guard rounding the corner, or a stray cat pausing to watch—her steps fell mute, the echo swallowed whole. The tiles drank each footfall, leaving only the faintest whisper of movement. She frowned, testing the silence, lifting her foot and setting it down again. No echo. Only when she convinced herself that no ear was near did the sound return, swelling like a tide that only appears when the shore is deserted.

Mara paused, hand on the cold brass of a door, and wondered whether the echo was a property of the space or a gift granted to solitude. She pressed her ear to the wall, listening for the hollow thrum of her own steps returning from the void. The answer came not in sound but in the quiet certainty that some phenomena exist only in the absence of witnesses, and that to be heard one must first be unheard.