short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Hollow and the Borrowed Lullaby

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The first hollow had worn its emptiness like a second skin for three winters. Pine needles never stuck to its ribs; frost passed through without biting. It moved through the wood without sound, a shape that held nothing, remembered nothing, wanted nothing — until the second hollow stepped from between the trunks carrying a memory that did not belong to it.

The memory was small: a woman's fingers braiding dark hair, a lullaby hummed low enough that only the child's scalp felt the vibration. The second hollow had taken it from a dying grandmother's last breath, not from malice but from the simple hunger that defines all hollows. It carried the memory in its chest cavity where a heart would sit, glowing faint and warm as a coal.

They stood in the needle-drift. The first hollow felt the memory reach across the space between them — not offered, not forced, simply spilling like light from a cracked lantern. The lullaby's notes settled into its hollow ribs. The woman's fingers became its own fingers. The child's scalp tingled against palms that had never held anything.

Oh, the first hollow thought, and the thought had edges, had weight, had shape. This is what it means to be full.

The second hollow watched, waited. When the memory had fully passed, it stood emptier than before — but its emptiness was different now. Clean. Chosen. The first hollow walked deeper into the wood carrying a lullaby it had never sung, for a child it had never met, and for the first time in three winters its footprints pressed deep into the snow.