family
The Mirror Remember
The mirror had been in our family for generations. Tall, framed in dark oak, with curling patterns carved along the edge like vines frozen in time. It stood in my grandmother's room, pressed between her wardrobe and window, half-covered by a faded velvet cloth. She used to say, “Some mirrors reflect. Others remember.” As a child, I never understood what she meant. I’d press my nose to the cold glass and make faces, giggling when it mimicked me back. But sometimes, when I wasn’t looking directly at it—when I glanced at it from the corner of my eye—it seemed to shimmer. Like the mirror was breathing. After Grandma died, I inherited the house. Dust had settled thickly on every surface, and the rooms echoed with silence. But the mirror remained—untouched, upright, waiting. I didn’t intend to keep it. I had grown up, moved on. Old things didn’t belong in modern apartments. But something about it—its weight, its presence—dared me to ignore it. On my third night in the house, I saw her. I had just brushed my teeth and walked past the mirror when a flicker caught my eye. I turned—and there she was. Not my reflection, but hers. My grandmother, standing where I should have been, in the same nightgown she always wore, her eyes soft but solemn. I gasped, stumbled back, and when I looked again, she was gone. I told myself I was tired. Dreaming. The mind plays tricks in old houses filled with memories. But the next night, I saw her again. She didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just watched me. Not with fear. Not with menace. With something else—urgency. Like she was trying to say something she no longer could. I started staying longer in front of the mirror, staring, waiting. And then, it changed. Not her. The room behind her. In the mirror’s reflection, the room was different—like a version from the past. The curtains were floral, not plain. A porcelain lamp sat on the nightstand that no longer existed. And on the bed… a little girl. Me. The mirror wasn’t just remembering her—it was remembering us. Each night, a new memory surfaced. My fifth birthday. Grandma teaching me to braid my hair. The time I cried because my mother had left again, and Grandma held me so tight I thought I’d break and heal all at once. The mirror, somehow, was showing me everything I had buried. Every joy. Every wound. But one memory stood out. It was raining. I was twelve, standing in that very room, shouting at Grandma. She had forbidden me from going to a party. I was cruel. I called her a bitter old woman who didn’t understand anything. In the mirror’s version of that night, I saw her cry after I slammed the door. I never knew she cried. I sat in front of the mirror that night, whispering apologies to the glass, hoping somehow she heard me. Then, for the first time, the mirror changed again. She appeared—older, paler—but this time, she smiled. Not the tight, sorrowful smile from before. A full, forgiving smile. Her lips moved silently. “I remember. And I forgive.” Tears spilled down my cheeks. I touched the glass. It was warm. The next morning, the mirror was empty. Just my reflection, tired and red-eyed, staring back. I kept the mirror. I placed it in my hallway, uncovered. Not as a decoration, but as a memory keeper. Sometimes, on quiet nights, I see flickers in the glass. Not just of Grandma, but others. My father, who died when I was young. An old friend I lost touch with. Even parts of myself I thought I’d forgotten. It doesn’t frighten me anymore. Because now I understand. Some mirrors don’t just reflect who we are. They remember who we were— And remind us of who we can still be.
By Azmat Roman ✨about a year ago in Fiction
We Fell in Love Between the Pages
It began, as the best stories often do, in a bookstore. I had just moved to the city, the kind of move you make when you're not sure what you're running from or chasing. A fresh start, I told myself. I wandered into a little secondhand bookstore tucked between a laundromat and a coffee shop. It wasn’t anything special at first glance—dusty shelves, faint smell of paper and cinnamon—but something about it felt like home. I didn’t know then that he would be there. That he always came on Saturdays. That he had a favorite spot, tucked in the back corner beneath the poetry section, where he’d sit on the floor with a stack of books like he was building a fortress made of words. I noticed him before he noticed me. He had messy dark hair that refused to stay put and glasses that kept sliding down his nose. He was completely absorbed in his book, lips moving slightly as he read—Shakespeare, I think. Something about sonnets and stars. I didn’t say anything, just watched for a moment longer than I should have, then found a book of my own and curled up on the armchair near the window. The second time we crossed paths, I was the one reading Neruda. He glanced at the spine of my book as he passed by and said, “That’s my favorite poem.” I looked up, startled. “Which one?” “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines,” he said. Then, without asking, sat across from me and quoted the first line. “‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’” He smiled, as if the words were his own. I smiled back, despite myself. We didn’t exchange names that day. But after that, we kept meeting there. Saturdays turned into habit. We began talking about books, always books—Tolstoy, Angelou, Plath, Márquez. He’d recommend something, and I’d come back the next week with thoughts scrawled in the margins. I’d lend him my copies, and he’d return them with pressed flowers tucked between the pages and underlined phrases like hidden confessions. Eventually, it became more than literature. He told me about his late nights writing poetry and the dog he missed back home. I told him about my childhood in a small town where stories were the only escape, how my parents used to fight in the next room and I’d bury myself in novels to drown it out. Still, we never met outside the bookstore. It was like we had built our own little world between the pages—untouched by reality, suspended in ink and time. I wasn’t sure when it turned into something more. Maybe it was the way he looked at me when I laughed at a line from Austen. Or the way he always remembered how I took my coffee—black with one sugar, no cream. Or maybe it was the note he left inside a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre. “If we’re both fiction, I’m glad you’re the chapter I got to live in.” I didn’t say anything that day. I read the note, closed the book, and walked out of the store with my heart louder than the city traffic. The following Saturday, I didn’t go. I was afraid, I think. Of what it meant. Of what we were outside of that space. But he showed up at my door that evening, holding the book and looking like he’d read a sad ending. “How did you find me?” I asked, breathless. “I asked the bookstore owner. He said you left your number on your membership form.” I stood there, unsure of what to say. He handed me the book. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” I opened it. There was a new note inside. “Love is not limited to chapters. It spills over margins, scribbles into the real world. Maybe we can, too.” I looked at him. “What if the real world ruins us?” He smiled. “Then we rewrite.” And just like that, I fell in love with him again—not between the pages, but in the space beyond them. In the way he waited. In the way he hoped. In the way he believed that stories didn’t have to end where the book closes. Now, years later, our apartment is filled with books—some old, some new, some with scribbles in the margins and little drawings only we understand. On our wedding day, he read from Neruda again, and I finally underlined the lines that had defined us all along. “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving.” And so we keep reading. Keep writing. We fell in love between the pages— and built a life in the lines that followed.
By Azmat Roman ✨about a year ago in Fiction
What The Ocean Took
The ocean had always been a part of Clara’s life. She was born in a cottage on the windswept cliffs of the Maine coast, raised by a fisherman father who smelled of salt and seaweed and a mother who hummed old sea shanties as lullabies. Every morning, the tide whispered stories through the stones and sea-glass outside their home. Clara used to listen, believing the waves carried messages from another world. But on the morning of October 12th, when she was seventeen, the ocean stopped telling stories. That was the day her brother, Eli, didn’t come back. It had started like any other autumn morning. A pale mist hovered above the waves, and the sea was restless, but not angry. Clara had brought Eli a thermos of hot tea as he packed the lobster traps into their father’s old skiff. His smile was lopsided, still half-asleep. He ruffled her hair, promised to be back by noon, and pushed off into the gray. He never returned. The Coast Guard searched for three days. They found the skiff capsized near Blackwater Cove, one trap caught in a reef, its wire bent like it had struggled against something far stronger than a crustacean. But there was no sign of Eli. No body. No clue. Just the silence that followed. Their mother stopped singing. Their father sold the boat. Clara stopped going near the water. Years passed, but the grief did not dull—it calcified, like barnacles clinging to her ribs. Clara moved inland to Boston for college, studied marine biology to try to make sense of the very thing that had taken her brother. She spent years trying to understand the language of tides, the patterns of currents, even the behavior of storms. None of it answered the question that kept her awake at night: What did the ocean take him for? --- Ten years later, Clara returned to the coast. Their mother had died the previous winter, and the cottage sat vacant, the sea breeze peeling paint from the shutters. Her father had long since moved south, leaving the place in Clara’s name. She hadn’t planned to stay more than a few days—just long enough to settle the estate and say goodbye properly. But the ocean called to her again. It was subtle at first. The crash of waves no longer made her flinch. The salt air began to feel like home. One evening, as she stood barefoot on the rocks where Eli used to fish, she saw something glinting between the stones. A silver pendant. She recognized it instantly—Eli’s Saint Christopher medallion, the one their mother had given him when he first learned to swim. The chain was tangled with seaweed, and the metal was tarnished by years underwater. Clara stared at it in disbelief. The tide had gone out, revealing the medallion just feet from where she stood. How could it have surfaced now, after a decade? How had it not washed away? That night, she dreamed of Eli. He stood on the shore, soaked and pale, speaking in a language she didn’t recognize—his mouth moved like the tide, rhythmic, deep. When she reached for him, a wave pulled her under. She woke gasping. Something had changed. --- The days grew stranger. Clara began hearing whispers in the wind—faint, unintelligible sounds that disappeared the moment she turned her head. At night, the waves seemed to echo her name. The beach behind the cottage yielded more objects: a boot she remembered Eli wearing, a bit of red cloth from his old flannel shirt. She wasn’t losing her mind—at least, not in the way others feared. She was being summoned. The morning she decided to answer, the sky was cloudless, the sea unusually still. She put the medallion around her neck and walked into the surf. She expected cold, but the water was warm—welcoming. It rose past her knees, her waist, her chest. When it covered her head, she opened her eyes. The world beneath was not the dark, silt-churned abyss she feared. It was luminous. Schools of silver fish darted through glowing kelp forests. Bioluminescent tendrils lit a path downward, and she followed, breathing as if she were still on land. At the bottom, she saw him. Eli. He hadn’t aged. His eyes were the same sea-glass green. He stood barefoot on a ridge of coral, arms open, as though waiting all this time. “This is what the ocean took,” a voice echoed—not Eli’s, but the ocean’s itself. Clara understood then. The sea hadn’t stolen him. It had chosen him. Just as it now chose her. The world above the waves faded. The next day, the townspeople found Clara’s footprints leading into the surf. No one ever saw her again. But if you stand on the cliffs on certain misty mornings, some swear they hear two voices singing—a brother and sister, their harmony carried on the tide.
By Azmat Roman ✨about a year ago in Fiction
Milk of Human Kindness. Top Story - June 2025.
The baby in his sling was heavy against her. The smell of him hung in the air around and between them. Lingering and following like another companion. Thick with sleep, slightly sour with milk. It clung to her shawl, to her skin, just as much as the dust that rose with every step. It mixed with sweat, and body-smell, and campfire smoke.
By L.C. Schäferabout a year ago in Fiction
One Night. Top Story - June 2025. Content Warning.
**Inspired by a dream that I had last night** We were coming home late from a dinner with a group of friends on a Thursday night. It was just a regular day for us. We both had worked and decided that we wanted to go out afterwards. He was driving our old brown Explorer when we were hit by a drunk driver.
By Chloe Unfilteredabout a year ago in Fiction
The Last Delivery
BY SHAFI ULHAQ The rain started the moment he turned onto Maple Street, thick drops blurring the windshield and rhythmically drumming against the roof of the van. Eli leaned forward, squinting past the wipers as he pulled up to house number 34—the last delivery on his route.
By Shafi ulhaqabout a year ago in Fiction
My Mother the Algorithm
My Mother the Algorithm By [Gulmalook] When my mother died, she left behind 24,986 emails, a blog with 1,384 entries, 73,000 text messages, and a sprawling mess of social media posts that spanned over two decades. Photos, voice notes, home videos. A life, digitized.
By gul malookabout a year ago in Fiction
grandad
He was there , once upon a time, along time ago. He was in my life briefly but he's influence remains many years after he passed and left me. In fact this is the 50th without him being there. Strangely , I am told again of the things we did together, the places we went and the tobacco tin of sweets. the strange bit is I remember the sweets, remember the time but struggle with his face.
By ASHLEY SMITHabout a year ago in Fiction
