A short story sculpted through truth and fire.
The droplets tapped against the windowpane without music just a hollow, endless rhythm. In this house, the silence was enclosed within nothingness. Built from tired wood and forgotten steel, it sat crouched against the grey belly of Michigan’s endless rain. Its windows swallowed sound, leaving behind only the resigned scraps of decaying gusts. Silence crept into the cracks of the walls; it filled the spaces between breaths. The air felt suffocating, the chest tightening, like someone had held their breath for twenty-eight years and forgotten to be there. Today, the walls leaned in closer than ever, listening whispering longstanding, well-kept treasures.
She didn’t wake up with a fright that could make someone’s hair stand on end. It wasn’t that kind of fear anymore. It had declined slowly, thoroughly into a state more cold-blooded, more fragile, than fear had ever been. The woman in question moved through the house like a guest in someone else’s body a substitute, a body double sustained only by endurance. Nothing more than a knot in the chest. The calm before the storm.
The rules shifted daily. The promises of one morning were forgotten by dusk. She had been equipped to tiptoe around, making sure to check the weather conditions like the climatologist she was. Despite the fact that even the best meteorologists grow jaded with the storms they study, this woman was weary of conforming, translating her quietude into strategy in instalments.
It was Tuesday again the Day of the Judgement. Once a week, the family gathered for a ritual they never named. They ate, they smiled, they laughed too loud but somewhere, the empty chair at the end of the table pulsed like a wound. Every week, the same unspoken demand floated through the heavy air: Will she sit today?
She could feel the weight of their eyes even when they pretended not to look. The corresponding test was conducted weekly a test without rules, a quiz minus questions, and an acuity with no remorse or empathy. As if somewhere, a report card had already been filled out in red ink, long before she even opened her mouth. Sit or stand. Smile or frown. Speak or stay silent. Every choice felt wrong. Every answer had already been marked as a failure.
And today in spite of the tightness in her throat, regardless of the sweat at her back she saw something new. The chair wasn’t a trap; it was a mirror. A monument to the years she’d spent waiting for permission. And now she realised permission was a myth. She could sit. Or she could rise. But either way, it had to be her choice this time.
In defiance of the blistering foot, the sweaty palms, and the lump in her throat, she sat in the chair. It greeted her like it always knew she’d come an invisible throne, waiting for its queen. The words, long buried in the dark folds of her chest, burst out of her like a white bellbird desperate to breathe, to be known. She stood again, held the chair that protruding, back-breaking thing and smashed it against the floor. Again. And again. Until nothing remained but splinters and silence.
And then as if the air snapped it escalated. One word too sharp. One breath too fast. A hand raised her brother’s. A scream she didn’t recognise as her own. And then: glass.
She saw it first a shard in her palm, glinting like truth. Her brother’s nose, red and dripping. The living room was frozen like a myth told too many times. And in that pause, the entire family rose in unity not to hold her, not to ask what happened but to declare her the monster. The villain. The destroyer. The doom in the house.
They roasted her with memory. With silence. With whispers made louder by repetition. She stood there stripped bare as if every ounce of flesh was carved, discarded, and thrown to the floor like crumbs.
“Where was your concern,” she asked through a hoarse whisper, “when I was the one being beaten? When I was scarred? When my flesh was a battlefield and no one came running?” No one answered.
Later that night, she turned the tap in the bathtub. Let the water run. Sank deeper and deeper until the house disappeared, the whispers gone, the war paused. She did not cry. She did not flinch. She simply slept suspended in silence that finally didn’t hurt.
When the water cooled, she rose. Later, with hands raw and eyes laser-focused, she began to build a new one. Not a throne made of scrutiny, but a cushion traded from love, devotion, and admiration something not built to restrain her gifts. Something that triumphantly felt like her.
End.
This story was my submission for The India Writing Project. It carries fragments of truth and survival a reflection on silence, self-liberation, and the reclamation of voice. My first fiction piece under “Reflections”.
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