short fiction · 2026-10-29

Lexicon of the Unsaid

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

In the northern dialect, there is no verb for "to miss." Instead they say the hollow grows, or the chair remembers. A child learns to measure absence in chair-widths, in the specific cold of an unworn coat. By winter she knows seventeen grades of silence: the silence of snow falling, of snow settled, of snow melting into ground that won't hold it. Her grandmother taught her that grief is not a noun but a weather system — pressure dropping, wind shifting, the sky turning the color of old bruises. When the anthropologist asked for the word for heartbreak, the old woman laughed and pointed at the horizon. There, she said. It has no name because it is the landscape itself.