General Fiction posted June 14, 2025

Chapters:

...14 15 -16- 17 ...

Exceptional

This work has reached the exceptional level

Power of Absence

A chapter in the book The Quiet Gift

The Letter

by Joie de Leon

There was a letter. Everyone knew it existed.

But no one ever saw it, read it, or spoke its contents aloud. Not once. It was never written down. Not on paper, not in whispers, not even in thought. It hovered—something palpable yet untouchable, a secret folded into the very air around us.

It was the kind of secret that didn’t vanish when ignored; instead, it grew heavier. It settled in rooms, thickened the space between people, lingered in silences that stretched too long.

I’m the one who found it.

I don’t remember where exactly, but I know it was in the attic. Dust motes drifting in pale shafts of light, the smell of old wood and forgotten years. The letter was tucked in a brittle envelope, yellowed and cracked at the edges, but the ink inside? Invisible. No mark anywhere. Just... the idea of a letter.

I held it. Felt it press into my palm.

And that was the moment everything changed.

The others never asked what it said. No one dared. The question hung in the air, always unspoken. You could see it in their eyes—the desperate curiosity locked behind a gate they refused to open.

“Did you read it?” my sister asked once, voice trembling as if the answer might shatter her.

“I did,” I said. But that was a lie.

How could I read a letter without words? How could I read silence?

I never told them what was inside because I don’t know. Because it wasn’t inside at all. The letter was a vessel for everything unsaid, for the fractures we couldn’t heal.

The attic

The attic had always been a secret place for me. A refuge from the noise below, the sharp edges of our fractured family life. Boxes piled high, forgotten relics of lives lived before me. Old photographs in sepia tones, cracked porcelain dolls, and dust-covered books with titles faded beyond recognition.

That day, the letter lay hidden beneath a loose floorboard, tucked between two thick leather-bound volumes. The envelope was fragile, its edges brittle as if the paper itself might crumble to dust with a single touch.

I wanted to open it, to break the spell. But even then, a silent warning stopped me. It wasn’t just the letter — it was *what* the letter represented.

The moment of holding

I brought it downstairs and placed it on the kitchen table, the heart of the house, where we still pretended to be a family.

My mother paused mid-step, her hand hovering near the envelope, as if the mere act of touching it might unravel everything.

My father glanced at it, then away. His jaw tightened like he carried a weight too heavy to bear.

My sister, younger and less guarded, reached out a finger, hesitated, then pulled her hand back as if burned.

No one spoke.

The unspoken terror

Days bled into one another. The letter sat unopened, and yet it was the centerpiece of every quiet moment. We circled it like wary animals, afraid to provoke whatever slept beneath that thin paper shell.

My sister tried to break the silence once. “What if it’s a curse?” she whispered one evening, her voice barely audible over the ticking clock.

My father’s laugh was sharp and brittle. “Curses don’t come in envelopes.”

My mother’s eyes were hollow when she said, “Some things aren’t meant to be known.”

And yet, we all wanted to know.

The letter as a mirror

It was a mirror — reflecting every crack in our family, every secret we buried too deep to name.

I saw it in my sister’s restless pacing, her gaze clouded with fear and something darker—guilt? Shame? I wasn’t sure.

I saw it in my father’s avoidance, the way he stopped answering questions, his silence louder than any confession.

I saw it in my mother’s tears, falling quietly in the kitchen late at night, alone with the ghost of a past we never discussed.

My failed attempts

I tried to write what the letter might say, hoping the act of writing could break the spell. But words failed me. Every sentence turned to ash on the page, every phrase dissolved into nonsense.

It wasn’t meant to be written.

The night of silence

One night, the house felt like a tomb.

We sat in the living room, the three of us, the letter resting on the coffee table like a wound waiting to bleed.

My sister reached out, trembling. “Maybe we should open it.”

My father’s hand shot out, pulling her away. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

His voice cracked.

And so the letter remained closed.

The silence stretched between us, heavy and unyielding.

The disappearance

Weeks later, my sister vanished.

She left no note, only a blank piece of paper folded on the kitchen table where the letter had been.

I searched for her everywhere—down the old trail by the river, through the empty fields, in the towns nearby. But she was gone.

My parents’ grief turned to stone. They stopped speaking, stopped eating.

The letter stayed in the living room, silent and untouched, as if absorbing all the sorrow that filled the house.

The weight of absence

Years passed, and the letter never left us.

The house grew colder. The walls seemed to lean in, suffocating us with memories.

I carried the letter with me, tucked inside the pages of a book no one else dared open.

Sometimes at night, I would hold it close, feeling the emptiness between my fingers—a void that shaped everything we became.

It wasn’t just a letter.

It was the silence between the words, the space where our family broke, the story we could never tell.

The story behind the silence

People sometimes ask me if I know where the letter came from.

I don’t.

There are rumors. That it was written long ago, by someone who vanished without a trace. That it contains a secret so dark it must never be spoken aloud.

Or that it is a promise, a warning, a confession — or all of these things at once.

But I know this: the letter’s meaning isn’t in its ink, because it has none. Its power lies in its silence, in what we refuse to say.

It shapes us, binds us, haunts us.

The letter is a story without words, a wound that will never heal.

And it controls everything.

Attempts at confrontation

The first attempt: The reading aloud

A few days after the letter appeared on the kitchen table, my sister proposed something bold.

“We should read it aloud,” she said one evening, voice steady despite the tension.

We gathered in the living room, the envelope sitting in the middle of the low wooden table like a beating heart.

My father nodded once, a grim look on his face. My mother’s fingers trembled as she poured tea, her eyes never leaving the letter.

I reached out and touched the envelope’s brittle edges. It was colder than I expected.

My sister tore it open with hesitant fingers. The flap came loose, but inside... nothing.

Not a word.

No ink, no paper, no message—just a blankness that stretched into infinity.

We sat there, stunned, the silence heavier than before.

My father’s voice broke finally. “It’s empty.”

“Then why does it feel like it’s not?” my sister whispered.

Because the letter was never about what was written. It was about what wasn’t.

The second attempt: The rewriting

A week later, I tried to confront it in a different way.

I sat at the desk in my old room, a blank sheet of paper before me, and a pen trembling in my hand.

If the letter wouldn’t tell me its secret, maybe I could write it myself.

I wrote the first sentence: “This letter contains…”

But the words tangled, twisting into nonsense on the page. Every sentence I formed dissolved like smoke.

Frustrated, I crumpled the paper and threw it across the room.

My mother knocked lightly on the door. “Don’t waste yourself on ghosts,” she said softly.

“I have to try,” I whispered.

But I knew she was right. Some things are beyond trying.

The third attempt: The burning

One afternoon, my father brought a small firepit into the backyard.

“We’ll burn it,” he said. “If the letter has no truth, then let it be ashes.”

We gathered around as he placed the letter on the firepit grate.

The paper began to curl and blacken.

But as the flames licked the edges, the letter didn’t burn. It resisted the fire, its fragile surface unmarked.

My father dropped it in shock.

“It won’t burn,” I said.

“It won’t,” he echoed, face pale.

And so it stayed, unscathed, a ghost resisting even destruction.

The fourth attempt: The discussion

One night, after a dinner eaten in heavy silence, my mother tried to speak about the letter.

“It’s time we faced it,” she said, voice trembling. “We need to say it out loud. What it means. What we’re afraid of.”

My father shook his head, hands clenched. “There is nothing to say.”

“Then why does it haunt us?”

My sister’s eyes filled with tears. “Because we’re afraid it’ll destroy us if we speak.”

“Then we’ll be destroyed in silence,” my mother said softly.

No one knew what to say next. The words got caught in our throats like knives.

The letter sat on the table, a silent judge of our failed attempts.

The aftermath

Each time we tried to confront the letter, the house grew colder. The distance between us stretched wider.

We stopped asking questions. We stopped pretending things were okay.

The letter was a presence that couldn’t be faced, a wound that couldn’t be healed.

When my sister disappeared, the letter’s silence became a scream inside the walls.

And now, years later, I carry that silence with me.

Write A Review

Unwritten contest entry

This story revolves around the power of absence- the idea that what remains unwritten can shape and haunt us as much as what is spoken or written down. The central "letter" is never revealed, and its silence becomes a force that controls the characters and the narrative itself.

In crafting this tale, I wanted to explore how secrets can bind families, how silence can carry weight, and how sometimes the most profound truths are those that cannot be articulated. The letter's content is deliberately left blank, emphasizing that the most impactful stories are sometimes the ones that exist only in what we choose not to say.

I hope this story invites you to reflect on the unseen, the unheard, and the unspeakable elements in your own life- the moments and memories that shape us without ever being fully told.

Pays one point and 2 member cents.

You need to login or register to write reviews. It's quick! We only ask four questions to new members.