short fiction · 2026-10-29

Hydrogen Bonds

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The glass sits on the windowsill, unchanged. But the water inside has held the rain that fell on her grandmother's roof in 1947, the tea her mother brewed with trembling hands the night the telegram came, the bath she ran for her own daughter when the fever broke. Each molecule a small archive. She dips a fingertip — cold, ordinary — and thinks: the hydrogen bonds do not care about meaning. They only hold. And release. And hold again.