The Father's Silence
August thickened like honey poured too slowly from a jar, golden and heavy and unwilling to let go. The boy woke each morning to the same heat pressing down on the house, the same drone of cicadas swelling in the trees. Even the clocks seemed sluggish, the hands crawling across their faces as though time itself were weary of moving.
He noticed it first at breakfast, the silence at the table. His grandmother set out bread and jam, poured the tea, cleared her throat once but said nothing more. His father sat opposite him, shoulders bent forward, jaw unshaven, the skin beneath his eyes dark and bruised with tiredness. He chewed each bite slowly, without tasting, his gaze fixed not on the boy, not on the room, but on some invisible point far away.
The boy wanted to ask him where he went when his eyes drifted like that, what land his mind traveled to while his body sat stiff and heavy in the wooden chair. But he didn't. Questions never seemed to cross the space between them. They rose to his lips, trembling, then fell like stones back into his chest.
So he ate in silence, mimicking his father's movements.....the same bites, the same lowering of the head.....though he chewed with the sharp awareness that he was pretending.
After breakfast, his father left without a word. The boy heard the door close, the boots thud down the steps, then the sound of him walking toward the road. Work, perhaps. Or simply walking. His grandmother sighed and collected the plates, humming something faint and tuneless to cover the hollow his absence left behind.
The boy lingered at the table. The empty chair across from him seemed more alive than the man who had just filled it. He placed his hand on the chair's backrest, fingers tracing the grooves where years of use had worn the wood smooth.
He whispered under his breath: "Talk to me."
But the chair said nothing, and he felt foolish.
That afternoon he wandered down to the river, ignoring his grandmother's warning about snakes. The water ran slow and thick with summer heat. He crouched at the bank, squinting at his reflection. The boy's face floated back at him.....round cheeks, dark eyes.....but the longer he stared, the more it blurred into something else. For a moment, he thought he saw another face there, a girl's, faint and flickering.
Anna.
He leaned closer, heart hammering, until his nose nearly touched the water. He could almost imagine she was looking back at him, her lips parting as though to speak.
He reached out a trembling hand, but the surface broke at his touch, ripples scattering the face into nothing.
"Wait," he whispered, though she was already gone.
The reeds swayed in the breeze, a low rustle that might have been an answer, or might have been nothing at all.
Back at the house, the boy slipped into the attic room, careful to close the door softly behind him. Dust hung in the air, glowing gold in the light that leaked through the single small window. The diary waited where he had hidden it, beneath the loose floorboard under the bed.
He opened it with reverence, his fingers brushing the uneven ink strokes that carried Anna's voice across time. He read a passage he had marked the night before:
August 3. Father says the roses will die in the frost, but I don't care. I only want them now. Even a little while is enough.
The boy's throat tightened. He pulled a pencil stub from his pocket and pressed it into the margin, his handwriting small and cramped:
August 12. You wrote the river was your friend. It is mine too. Do you still go there?
He stared at the words until they blurred. He knew no answer would ever appear, but he closed the book gently anyway, as though his message might drift across years, waiting for her to return.
That evening at supper, his father returned. His shirt smelled faintly of smoke, though from work or drink the boy could not tell. He sat down, bowed his head, and ate without a word. The boy wanted to break the silence, to say I know her. I know she planted roses. I know she loved the river.
But he didn't. The silence pressed too thickly, heavy as the August air. His father's grief was like a locked chest: the boy sensed that if he touched it, it might splinter both of them.
So he chewed his bread quietly, matching his father bite for bite. His grandmother filled the room with the clatter of dishes, her way of filling the emptiness, but the silence between father and son remained, vast and unbroken.
That night, lying in bed, the boy clutched the diary to his chest and listened to the house creak in its old age. He whispered into the dark, a question too small for anyone else to hear:
"Is even a little while really enough?"
The darkness gave no answer, only the steady ticking of the clock downstairs, each beat like a drop of water falling endlessly into a well.
The next morning, he rose earlier than usual, restless from dreams that dissolved the moment he opened his eyes. The house was still. His grandmother still asleep, his father not yet returned.....or perhaps already gone again. The boy padded barefoot across the wooden floor, down the stairs, and into the kitchen.
The clock ticked on the wall. Tick. Tick. Tick. Every sound seemed louder in the emptiness. He pulled out a chair and sat, staring across the table at the empty place where his father should have been.
The boy tried something then. He cleared his throat softly, leaned forward, and whispered into the stillness as though his father sat across from him. "What do you see, when you stare out the window like that? Where do you go?"
The silence was complete. Only the clock answered, its hands moving steadily, mercilessly, forward.
The boy's shoulders slumped. He folded his arms on the table and buried his face, breathing in the faint scent of last night's bread. His stomach knotted with the ache of something he could not name.....not hunger, not quite sadness, but a sharp longing that seemed to stretch out endlessly ahead of him.
By mid-morning, the sun already scorched the yard. He carried a bucket of water to the chickens, the metal handle biting into his palm. They clucked around him in their restless way, pecking at the ground, flapping their wings with sharp bursts of sound. The boy crouched and set the bucket down.
As he watched them drink, he thought suddenly: This is what time looks like. Pecking, scratching, never stopping, never satisfied.
The thought startled him. He stood quickly, brushing the dust from his knees. His father's silence had begun to seep into him, not just as an absence, but as a weight that shaped his thoughts.
That evening, when his father returned again, the boy decided he would try. Just once.
He sat across from him, heart hammering, fingers tightening around the edge of the table. He thought of Anna's words.....Even a little while is enough. He thought of the roses, the river, the diary hidden under his mattress.
And then, as his father lifted his fork, the boy said, in a voice so small it almost disappeared:
"Did you ever play by the river, when you were a boy?"
The fork froze halfway. His father's head turned slowly, his eyes narrowing.....not with anger, but with something unreadable, shadowed. For a moment the boy thought he had broken some sacred law.
But then the fork lowered. His father looked away, out the window where the last light of day was bleeding from the sky. His lips parted, as if he might speak. The boy held his breath, waiting.
Silence stretched.
And then, finally, in a voice hoarse with disuse, his father said, "Yes."
Just that. One word, rough as stone, but it cracked the silence open like a seed splitting underground.
The boy's heart raced. He wanted to ask more.....to say What games? Who were you with? Did you laugh? Did she go there with you? But his father's face had already closed again, his eyes hard as shutters drawn tight.
The boy nodded silently and lowered his gaze, but inside he glowed. The silence was not unbreakable. It could be breached, if only by a single word.
That night, in the attic, he opened the diary with shaking hands. By candlelight, he read Anna's entries again, lingering over the ones about the river. He imagined her there, laughing, splashing, barefoot on the bank. And now he knew.....his father had once stood in that same place.
The river was not just his. It belonged to all of them. Past, present, future.
He pulled the pencil from his pocket and scrawled into the margin:
August 15. He said yes. He played by the river. So it's true.....you were both there once. I think time is like the river. We all step into it, but never at the same place. Still, it carries us together.
The candle guttered, throwing shadows across the page. The boy smiled faintly, closed the diary, and whispered into the still air:
"Goodnight, Father. Goodnight, Anna."
And for once, the silence felt almost gentle.
The next day, a storm threatened. The air grew thick, heavy with the scent of rain that refused to fall. The boy spent the morning restless, moving from room to room, touching objects without knowing why: the back of a chair, the smooth cold rim of a glass, the frayed hem of a curtain. Everything felt charged, as if the house itself held its breath.
When his father returned earlier than usual, the boy was startled. His boots thudded on the porch, the door creaked, and suddenly he was there.....dark hair plastered by sweat, shirt clinging to his shoulders. He set down his tools, washed at the basin, and sat at the table without speaking.
His grandmother served stew. The boy watched his father's hands, rough and scarred, as they broke the bread. The silence between them was thicker than the storm clouds outside.
The boy longed to ask another question, anything, but fear tightened his throat. He thought of the single word his father had given him the night before, and how much it had meant. He feared pushing too far, feared closing that door forever.
So he ate quietly, letting the clatter of spoons and the soft hiss of the lantern fill the space where words should have been.
Later, when thunder cracked across the sky, the boy slipped outside. The first drops of rain fell warm on his skin. He tilted his head back, letting them wash across his face, until the sky opened fully and the world turned silver with water.
He ran to the river, heart pounding. The storm had transformed it, the surface whipped with wind, waves splashing against the banks. The boy stood on the edge, soaked through, and shouted into the roaring air:
"I won't forget you!"
He didn't know if he meant Anna or his father or time itself. Maybe all of them. His voice disappeared into the storm, swallowed whole, but he felt lighter having said it.
When he finally returned, dripping, his father stood on the porch waiting. His expression was unreadable, half-shadow in the lightning.
"Fool boy," his father muttered, but his voice cracked.....not quite anger, not quite relief. He reached out, just barely brushing the boy's shoulder with his hand before pulling it back quickly, as though the gesture had been a mistake.
The boy shivered. That touch.....brief, fleeting.....meant more than a hundred words.
That night, thunder still rumbling in the distance, the boy lay in bed with the diary open on his chest. Candlelight flickered across Anna's words, across his own scrawled replies.
He whispered softly: "Even a little while is enough."
This time, he believed it.
And so the silence remained between them, father and son, but it was no longer absolute. It had been breached. Cracked. In the smallest of ways, it had given. And the boy, holding both Anna's voice and his father's ghost of a touch, understood that silence itself could be another language.....harder, sharper, but still capable of saying: I am here. I have not forgotten you.
He drifted into sleep to the sound of the storm receding, the clock ticking faithfully in the dark.