short fiction · 2026-10-12

Breath as Archive

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

After silence, breath is not air but archive: each inhale a finger tracing the spine of a book no one opened, each exhale the soft closing of its cover. The weight is not in the lungs but in the pages that remember being touched, in the dust that settles where no hand has rested for years. To breathe after silence is to carry the library of what was not said, to feel the quiet press against the ribs like a shelf too full of unread titles. The body becomes a reading room where the light never turns on, and yet, somehow, the words are still felt, not seen, in the pulse of the throat.