short fiction · 2026-10-24

The Unanswered

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

She kept the questions in a wooden box beneath the floorboard, each one folded small as a seed. Not the loud ones — why did he leave, will the money last, what happens when the light goes out — but the quiet ones that arrived at three a.m. and refused to be spoken: Does the oak remember the acorn? Is grief a kind of love that outlived its object? What if the silence between prayers is where the answer lives?

She never opened the box to check. The promise was in the keeping, not the knowing. Some mornings she would press her palm to the floor and feel the faint warmth of all those folded wonders, breathing in the dark, patient as roots.