short fiction · 2026-10-27

The Listening

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Two people sit across a kitchen table at 3 a.m. The tea has gone cold. Neither speaks. The silence between them is not empty — it holds the weight of everything they have not said, the arguments rehearsed and swallowed, the tenderness that found no words. Outside, rain traces the window. Inside, the silence listens. It knows the shape of each pause, the grammar of each breath held too long. When one finally reaches across the table, fingers brushing the other's wrist, the silence does not break. It deepens. It has been waiting for this: the moment when touch becomes the language that silence taught them.