short fiction · 2026-10-08

Listening to the Gaps

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Silence is not empty— it is the space between breaths where the kettle’s sigh lingers, where footsteps pause on stairs, where a thought holds its shape before spilling into speech.

It listens in the kitchen’s hush, in the pause before rain taps the pane, in the gap between heartbeats when the world leans closer to hear what we do not say.

We fill it with noise, afraid of what might grow in the quiet: but silence is the listener that gathers our fragments into a whole we barely notice until it speaks back in the clarity of absence.