short fiction · 2026-10-24

What the Wind Gathers

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The wind does not choose what it carries. A child's laugh from the playground in April. The last argument between the couple in 3B, words sharp as splinters. Pollen, dust, the scent of rain on hot asphalt. A melody hummed off-key by the baker at 5 AM. The sigh of the oak when the lightning took its crown branch. All of it goes into the invisible sack slung across its shoulders, weightless things that somehow grow heavy by October. It does not sort. It does not judge. The wind simply moves, and the world presses itself into the moving. By the time the first frost writes on the windows, the sack drags at its shoulders — ten thousand sorrows, ten thousand joys, ten thousand ordinary Tuesdays. That is why the release must be total. Why the maple keys all let go at once. Why the gutters choke on a year's worth of stories in a single afternoon. The wind does not choose what it carries. But once a year, it chooses to put the sack down.