short fiction · 2026-10-23

The Letter That Wasn't

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The hollow in the oak does not speak. It receives.

Mara presses her palm to bark, expects silence, gets instead a man's voice — not hers, not now — saying I should have told her the war took his legs, not his heart. The words settle in her ribs like splinters.

She spends forty years finding him. The veteran in the VA hospital, the daughter who never knew her father's last words were an apology to a ghost. When Mara finally stands at his bedside, the hollow in her own chest opens.

He dies before she can ask. The daughter reads the unsent letter Mara brings. I am sorry I let pride steal your childhood.

The oak stands unchanged. Its hollow holds nothing now but wind and beetles. But Mara's hands remember the weight of a stranger's regret, and her granddaughter, pressing small fingers to the same bark, whispers I hear someone crying — though no one is there.