Member-only story
FICTION
The Last Chair at the Table
A short story
The Silence that Waited
The door creaked open with a sound that felt like a sigh.
Elliot hadn’t stepped into his mother’s house in over four years.
He paused at the threshold, staring into the quiet that met him like an old friend wearing grief.
The living room still smelled of cinnamon and old paper.
The curtains were drawn halfway, allowing thin, lazy sunbeams to scatter dust across the floor like golden snow.
Nothing had changed.
And that, somehow, made everything worse.
His polished shoes echoed across the wooden floor as he walked toward the kitchen. It was habit, not memory, that pulled him there.
And there it was.
The table.
That same oval table with its faint water stains and one leg slightly shorter than the rest. Four chairs surrounded it, just like always. But it was the last one—the one closest to the back window—that stopped Elliot in his tracks.
His chair.
The cushion still flattened, worn at the edges, with a thread coming loose from the corner.
