short fiction · 2026-10-23

What the Walls Remember

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The house holds conversations it was never part of.

Morning light through the kitchen window catches dust motes — forty years of arguments, reconciliations, the quiet negotiation of who makes coffee. The scratch on the pine table where she set down her ring. The doorframe marked in pencil: 1987, 1991, 1994, 1998. Growth measured in fractions.

Now only one set of footsteps on the stairs. The silence doesn't settle; it accumulates. Each room a sentence left unfinished. The walls don't forget. They wait.