short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Echo in the Hollow

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Mara found the sycamore exactly where she left it, thirty years and two lifetimes ago. The hollow at its base had been a child's secret — a place to whisper wishes, to hide smooth stones, to press her ear against the bark and hear the earth's slow heartbeat.

Now her fingers traced the same rough opening, wider with age, its edges softened by decades of wind and rain. The woods had grown quieter. Fewer birds. The stream she remembered singing over stones now moved in a hush, as if the land itself had learned restraint.

She knelt, knees protesting on damp leaves, and spoke into the dark: "I never told him about the letter."

The hollow drank the words. Seconds stretched. Then — not her voice returned, but a woman's, older, tired, speaking from inside the tree: "You burned it before he could read. You told yourself it was mercy. It was fear."

Mara recoiled, hand flying to her throat. The echo continued, unhurried: "You thought silence protected him. It only protected you from watching him choose."

A second voice, softer, layered beneath: "He would have stayed. You knew. That's why you burned it."

The sycamore held its ground. The stream kept its hush. Mara pressed both palms to the bark, feeling vibration travel up her arms — not sound, but memory given weight, the particular gravity of things left unsaid.

When she finally stood, the hollow seemed smaller. Or she had grown larger around the space it carved in her.