short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Echo's Archive

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The hollow did not repeat. It kept.

Mara shouted her grief into the limestone throat on the third day after the funeral, and the hollow swallowed it whole — no answer, no bounce, just the cool damp press of stone drinking sound. She waited. The wind stirred ferns at the entrance. A bat clicked past. Nothing returned.

She came back the next morning with a different noise: her mother's laugh, recorded on a cracked phone, played loud into the dark. The hollow took that too.

By the week's end she had fed it twelve things: the lullaby her father hummed while fixing the roof, the argument she never finished with her brother, the sound of rain on the tin porch the night she decided to stay. Each offering vanished into the calcite ribs.

On the eighth day she brought silence. Just stood at the lip and breathed.

The hollow gave back her mother's laugh first — but slower, stretched like taffy, the sharp edges worn smooth by whatever dark geometry held it. The lullaby returned in a key that didn't exist, humming from the walls themselves. The argument came back as a single chord, resolved.

The silence she had offered returned as a voice she didn't recognize speaking words she had never said: You kept them. Now they keep you.

Mara pressed her palm to the wet wall. The stone was warm.