short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Interior Valley

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Inside her, the voices Burton named still shout their myriads — tetrarchs at the tongue's end, emperors in conceit, each grief demanding its own coronation. But she has learned to let them speak without answering. The melancholy tide still rises, slow and certain as Burton's slow tide seeping into inner seas, but she no longer builds levees of words against it. She watches the swell, names it — here comes the one who would make her a queen of sorrows, here comes the one who would dress her in sackcloth and call it royal purple — and lets each wave break on the shore of her attention without carrying her out to sea. The echo refuses her now, not the other way around. Her silence has grown teeth.