short fiction · 2026-10-30

Settling

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The manuscript sits on the desk, unfinished for three years. Dust has written its own marginalia — gray sentences in the gutters, commas between chapters, a slow colon at the end of the last line she typed: "She did not know what came next."

Each morning she wipes the cover clean. Each evening the dust returns, patient, rewriting her silence.

Today a mote lands on the period. It stays. She watches it catch the light, a tiny galaxy holding its breath. The cursor blinks. She types one word: Then.

The dust does not move. But the air around it shifts, as if the room has exhaled.