short fiction · 2026-10-30

The Woman Who Collected Silences

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

She kept them in mason jars on a shelf above her desk — each one labeled in her precise hand: The pause before my mother said she was proud, The space between the diagnosis and the doctor's next breath, The night my brother didn't call. She had forty-seven jars by the time she turned sixty. Visitors asked what she did with them. She smiled and said nothing, just tapped the glass where a silence lived, whole and unbroken, waiting for the moment someone would finally open it and hear what had never been said.