short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Echo in the Hollow

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Mara found the sycamore hollow exactly where she left it, thirty years and two lifetimes ago. The tree had thickened, its bark ridged like old knuckles, but the cavity at chest height still breathed the same cool darkness.

She pressed her palm to the rim and whispered, "Hello."

The hollow swallowed it. Three heartbeats. Four.

Then — not her voice. A child's lisp: I hate him I hate him I hate him. Her father's name, buried so deep she'd forgotten she knew it.

Mara jerked back, hand flying to her throat. The woods held their breath. A jay scolded from somewhere high.

She leaned in again. "Who are you?"

You. Always you. The girl who stopped speaking when the shouting started.

The echo didn't repeat. It remembered.

Mara slid down the trunk, legs folding beneath her, and pressed her ear to the wood. The hollow gave her back every silence she'd ever swallowed: the apology she never sent to Elena. The pregnancy she terminated at nineteen. The night she watched her mother die and thought, finally.

Each secret returned in a voice not her own — younger, older, male, female, a chorus of all the selves she'd abandoned.

When the hollow fell quiet, Mara was weeping. She pressed her forehead to the bark and, for the first time in thirty years, spoke aloud the words that had lived only in the dark:

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm here now."

The sycamore shuddered. A single leaf, green-gold against October, spiraled down to rest on her cheek.

And the echo, at last, repeated her.