By Sharmeen Imran

The sun barely filtered through the cracked blinds, casting jagged shadows across the room. The bed felt foreign beneath them, the sheets rough and musty. They blinked awake, disoriented, mind sluggish as they took in the dim surroundings. The room was shrouded in silence—thick and oppressive as if it held its breath waiting.

They swung their legs over the side of the bed and their feet met the cold wooden floor. The air was stale as if it was carrying something long forgotten. Slowly, they rose, wiping the sleep from their eyes, and stepped into the gloom of the hallway.

He stood at the end of the hall, no more than a shadow given the shape of a man. His form—broad shoulders, tall frame—was etched against the dim light that barely filtered through the window, the faint penumbra of the figure like charcoal smeared on old paper. The air between the two was heavy with something unspoken. It always was. His outline was clearer than his words—clearer than any conversation they could recall. He didn’t move; he never moved. They passed him by, without slowing.

The half-open back door let the wind inside, cold fingers tugging at their clothes. A boy was there, crouched low, his hands buried deep in the damp earth. His small body trembled with the energy of something that should have been joy but had instead turned sharp and bitter, as though the very act of play had soured into frustration.

His eyes lifted when he saw them, glistening like a clouded mirror. “Come out,” he called, his voice high. Too eager, too brittle. “Come out and play.” The words held a hunger that had never been fed, something ravenous behind his stare. He looked smaller now than he once had. Familiar, but faint, as time had blurred the lines of his face. His hands, slick with mud, reached out towards the house. The wind stirred the grass, but nothing else moved. The boy’s lips twisted in frustration, his mouth opening to call out again, louder this time, his small fists shaking with the fury of being forgotten. 

But they remained still, watching him from behind the veil of regret that draped over this place, a spectator to his endless game.

They turned away.

The air inside was thick with the weight of time, heavy with the scent of the neglected home—soot, old wood, something faintly sweet like rotting fruit. It clung to their skin and seeped into their lungs with every breath.

She waited in the kitchen, her eyes hollow with the same question she had never learned to stop asking. Her fingers were thin as bones and trembled as she held out a small, woven bracelet, the colors entangled in a faded pattern. The threads were frayed at the edges as if guilt had gnawed away at them, leaving only faint traces of the promises that were never kept.

“Take it,” she said, her voice as fragile as the ornament in her hand—barely a whisper against the weight of the house. The bracelet swayed gently in a wind that wasn’t there, a pendulum counting the moments that passed and the hope that still lingered. They didn’t reach for it.

She took a step forward and the light caught her fervent gaze. “Please,” her voice trembled. The air was thick with something unsaid, something still raw. But they only stood there and let the space stretch until it was a chasm.

Her hands trembled harder and the bracelet slipped from her grasp, falling to the ground without a sound. She recoiled, her face twisting as something darker, something brittle, broke free beneath the surface. Her once soft desperation now shattered into sharp edges. She took a step back as her lips twisted into something bitter. “Why?” she asked, though the word was more accusation than question, more wound than word.

They had answered this before, but no reply ever sent her away. They left her there, her back to the wall, her anger unresolved.

The hallway swallowed them back into its long, quiet embrace. The silhouette remained at the end, his presence more permanent than anything else in the house. Silent and unmoving, his figure was more an ink spill than man. They could feel his eyes on their back—always watching—a monument to what had never been said. 

They didn’t need to look to know his expression—there was none. There was always just the shape of him, fixed and permanent, waiting as always, as if time itself had forgotten to move forward. They passed him, as they always did, without a backwards glance.

But there was no peace here. The boy beckoned faintly, angrier with each call. The bracelet still lay discarded in the kitchen, an offering refused. The house breathed around them, full of voices, full of ghosts. Though none were dead. Not yet.

The ghosts pressed closer, hands outstretched. Not to harm, but to pull. To remind.

But the past was already here—it was woven into the walls of this place, into the very air they breathed. The reminiscence had become specters, never able to become the people they once were, never to return to what had been.

Eventually, they settled back into the bed, sinking into the cold sheets, the room never unfamiliar but forever unwelcoming. The house breathed around them—alive with the weight of those who remained in this world, but only clung to memories. No one had died. Not in the way one imagines. But they had left. Drifting further from each passing year, each silence, each moment that was never given back. They lingered not in the house but in the mind, caught amidst what was and what could have been, neither fully present nor fully absent.

The house was never empty. It never would be. It was full of faces that had become half-forgotten, full of voices that had grown sharp with silence. These apparitions were born not of death but of time, of distance, of words never spoken.

The spirits would stay like old wounds that never healed, lingering as the residue of something terribly painful. Not because they couldn’t, but because some part of them was still waiting. Waiting for the silence to break, waiting for the hands that would never reach out again.

The past didn’t haunt. It waited. And it stayed, long after everyone else had gone.