short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Grammar of Quiet

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

At 3 a.m. the house speaks in negatives. The refrigerator's hum — not the absence of sound but the presence of a machine keeping cold. Floorboards contracting: not footsteps but the memory of weight. She used to say silence isn't empty, it's full of what we stopped saying. I lie here cataloguing the grammar: the long vowel of the heater cycling on, the staccato of rain on the porch roof, the em-dash between her side of the bed cooling and mine warming. Grief, I'm learning, is not a sentence but a syntax — the way absence structures everything around it. The cat pads into the room, pauses, chooses the foot of the bed. Even he knows: some silences are for keeping, not breaking.