short fiction · 2026-10-30

The Silence She Would Not Jar

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The woman who collects silences has one she will not jar: the silence of her mother's kitchen at 3 a.m., the refrigerator humming its steady lullaby, the chair still warm where her mother sat waiting for a phone call that never came. She has tried — held the jar to the air, waited for the silence to settle like dust — but it refuses to be captured. It slips through glass, through cork, through the labels she writes in her careful script. This silence is not an object. It is a room she still enters barefoot, where the coffee pot clicks on by itself at 6 a.m., brewing for two. She leaves the jar empty on the shelf beside the three labeled 3 a.m., its label blank, its cork loose. Sometimes, in the late afternoon light, she catches it humming — not the refrigerator's hum, but her mother's, low and tuneless, stirring sugar into darkness.