| General Fiction posted June 25, 2025 | Chapters: |
1 2 -3- 4... 
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Also a response to The Sharp Quill Club challenge
A chapter in the book Dmitri's Extraordinary Fate
Dmitri's Extraordinary Fate: 3
by tfawcus
Book of the Month Contest Winner
| Background In the preceding chapters, Dmitri became catatonic after losing his twin sister, Mira, in a bombing. He is transferred to a clinic, but a chronic bed shortage sees him moved into Elena's care. |
The following day rolled into Dmitri’s consciousness with a clatter. Somewhere down the corridor, he heard Elena’s cheerful voice. A moment later, she appeared at the door, put a tray on the table, and opened the shutters to let in the breeze.
‘Look at that. Sunshine! And how is my dream-child this morning?’ She wiped her hands on her apron and looked at him with searching kindness.
He blinked. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to sustain her hope.
He could have spoken, could have sat up, taken the spoon from her hand, and begun the slow return to normality. The impulse was there, but he did not act on it.
Not yet.
Here, in this place of garden bowers and birdsong, silence was no longer a wound. Stillness had become his language. It spared him the burden of names and memories, and in its shelter, he felt less haunted.
Elena pulled the chair close and started to feed him.
‘You can stay quiet as long as you need,’ she said. ‘There’s no rush. Time doesn’t matter up here.’
She took his hand in hers. He didn't pull away. But neither did he respond.
Elena never hurried him. She moved about the lodge with the grace of someone who knew how to leave space for healing, how to be near without intruding. She brought rhythm to the day: tea in the morning, stories at dusk, quiet humming while she swept the hearth. She read aloud from books he barely followed, yet he listened. Not for meaning, but for the cadence of her voice and the tide of language washing over him. He should have thanked her, but he didn’t. Instead, he let the days unfold like spectres in the mist, soft and without edges.
And so the second silence began. This time, it was not imposed by trauma but by choice.
He began to take a more active interest in things around him. The lake was always visible. Always moving. He studied it in the way one studies a painting. He noticed the way morning light slanted across its surface and how the sun lit a corner of the bay before it touched the trees. He found himself noticing the colours that came after rain: steel blue, green-grey, and silvered mauve. The lake changed in response to wind and weather, yet at heart it remained constant, a quiet presence, like Elena’s. And like Elena, it asked nothing of him.
One morning, she entered and set the tray down beside him. A cup of tea, porridge laced with cream and honey, and beside it, a sketchpad and pencil.
She left without comment and walked out, singing the haunting melody of a folksong. It was about a son going to his death. A mother’s grief was sealed into the song. Dmitri sat by the window, listening, but not moving.
The last words floated up from the kitchen:
You slept where my own heart lay—
How shall I let you slip away?
You slept where my own heart lay—
How shall I let you slip away?
Silence settled after the last note, but the words echoed in his mind, stirring a recognition that it was not only his grief that lived here. He stared at the sketchpad and, with no fixed intention, he reached for the pencil and started to draw.
When Elena returned to retrieve the tray, she saw his sketch. He had drawn the headland seen from his window and the way it held the lake in the curve of a bow.
‘Well, look at that,’ she said. ‘You have quite a talent, young man. Next time I’ll bring paints. You can show me the colours you see.’
He did not reply, but the pencil remained in his hand long after she left.
Two days later, she returned with a box of acrylic paints and a set of brushes. ‘I thought you might like to try your hand with these today,’ she said, placing them beside his plate.
His eyes held a look of gratitude, and he nodded. It was barely more than a tilt of the chin. But it was the first time he had responded to her so directly.
He dipped a brush tentatively into the blue and began to paint. Pale lines arched upward like trees that didn’t belong to this world. Leaves fell like flame onto a path vanishing into white. Elena watched, her breath caught somewhere in her chest.
‘I used to think silence meant peace,’ she said. ‘Now I’m not so sure. Sometimes it just means hiding.’
She wondered if she was helping him. She hesitated, uncertain, but continued anyway.
‘I had a dream last night. About my son. He was standing in the doorway, looking at me. He didn’t say a word. He just stood there.’
Her voice quavered but didn’t break.
‘I lost him in the war. Stanislav. He was eighteen.’ She glanced at Dmitri. ‘Not much older than you,’ she said. ‘That’s why I don’t ask you to speak.’
She reached over and gently turned his palm upwards, revealing the jagged scars that ran along the inside of his arm like lightning burnt into his skin. She rubbed her thumb across one of them slowly.
‘These scars,’ she said, ‘they are not signs of failure but of your struggle. You did your best to save your sister. No one could have done more.’
He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. But he didn’t pull away either.
She placed his hand gently back on his lap, and for the first time, she reached out not as a carer but as something else, something harder to name. She touched his cheek, and she brushed a strand of hair from his forehead.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘when I first met you, you were somewhere else. Somewhere deep and far away. But now you seem to have changed. It’s different. You’re back here, aren’t you? I can feel it.’ She leant forward, her voice quiet but firm. ‘You follow conversations with your eyes. You move differently. You see me, Dmitri. You do.’
He looked at her then, truly looked, just for a second, before his gaze drifted away again, like a tide receding from the shore. Although he was not yet able to admit it, he was beginning to realise that his silence was no longer just the emptiness of grief, but the fear of coming to grips with life again.
Elena exhaled and set her mug down firmly, causing a wave of tea to splash onto the table. ‘I don’t know how long you are going to keep pretending,’ she said, ‘but what remains of your life is yours. Not Mira’s. Not mine. Yours.’
This time, when his eyes met hers, the anguish in them was not self-pity. He wanted to reach out to her, say her name, and acknowledge her grief, but the words caught in his throat. What if they undid the quiet that had become his refuge? What if life rushed back in, demanding things he couldn’t give?
However, later that night when he was alone, he whispered her name in the dark; it was scarcely more than a breath, but it marked the beginning of an intention.
Book of the Month Contest Winner |
 Recognized |
#2 June 2025 |
The Sharp Quill challenge was to write a piece that explores the unseen forces that bind people, events, or moments together. This might be emotional, psychological, spiritual, or something more abstract. Word limit: 750-1,200 words (Actual Word Count: 1193).
Image: Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash.
Image: Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash.
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