short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Hollow's Refusal

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The hollow had always been a vessel. Grief poured in and became river-water, clear and moving. Rage became flint, struck to spark. Even lies — those thin, sharp things — it could melt down into caution, into the habit of checking twice.

But the memory arrived on a Tuesday, carried in a voice that was not hers. A child's birthday party. Balloons the color of bruised plums. The taste of chocolate cake she had never eaten. The hollow swallowed it whole.

And choked.

The memory would not dissolve. It would not become anything else. It sat in the hollow's throat, heavy and foreign, a stone the river could not smooth. The hollow tried its old alchemies: heat, pressure, time. The memory only hardened.

By Thursday the hollow had stopped accepting new grief. The river backed up, flooding the banks. Rage had nowhere to strike. Lies accumulated like silt.

The memory that wasn't hers had broken the machine. The hollow now understood: some things are not fuel. Some things are simply wreckage, and the only transformation left is to become the thing that holds them.