short fiction · 2026-10-08

The Weight of Quiet

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

In the small apartment, the clock had stopped ticking long ago. Mara sat on the floor beside the window, her back against the cool plaster, and let the silence settle. It was not an absence of sound but a presence, thick as wool, pressing against her eardrums and the hollow of her chest. Each breath she drew felt like lifting a slight weight, the quiet pressing down on her ribs, reminding her of the words she had never spoken and the questions she had buried under years of noise. Outside, the city hummed—a distant traffic, a siren wavering—but inside, the silence held its own gravity, pulling her thoughts inward until they felt like stones in her palm. She closed her eyes and let the weight be, feeling it shape her, not crush her, as if the quiet were a friend who had come to sit with her in the dark, offering its steady pressure as a kind of comfort.