short fiction · 2026-10-26

The Third Chair

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The third chair at the kitchen table has held a stack of unopened mail for three months. Before that, it held her mother — the oxygen tank's quiet hiss beneath the clink of tea cups, the stories repeated like prayers, the way she'd reach for a biscuit and her hand would hover, trembling, before finding it.

Before that, it held the baby. The high chair clamped to the table's edge, sweet potato smeared on the tray like abstract art, the gummy grin that made everything worth it. The pediatrician's voice on the phone: developmental delay, let's monitor, come back in six months. Six months became twelve. The high chair folded into the garage.

Now the mail pile grows: insurance statements, a jury summons, a coupon for a carpet cleaning they don't need. He sets his coffee down beside it each morning. She moves it to the counter each night. Neither mentions the empty chair. Neither mentions the phone call they should make to the specialist, the form they should fill out, the word autism that lives in the browser history on her phone, cleared every evening.

Their conversations orbit the absence. Did you pay the electric. The tomatoes need staking. Your mother called. The tomatoes need staking. I know you said that.

The third chair holds the weight of all the sentences that begin We should talk about and end in silence.