Legacy: a short story

Hello everyone! I wrote this short story to be published in ANU's literary magazine - the 'Rabbit Hole', but I want to share it with you too. Please let me know what you think!

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Death is ordinary and simple, in the way that falling is ordinary and simple – an inevitability and a law of nature. Grief is anything but. Unlike death, grief is ceaseless, neither fully seen nor entirely absent. It does not demand attention, yet is always there, watching. It lingers in the weight of a doorknob, or the hush of a room, and moves around soundlessly, trailing in your footsteps. I felt it then, behind me, as I approached the wrought iron gates guarding my childhood home, allowing myself a few seconds of stillness.

I watched the sliver of sunlight, peering from behind the clouds, shining upon the steel bars. These gates once stood proudly as a sentry for my home but were now reduced to a nuisance that croaked noisily as the breeze flowed past. Such is the tragedy of a life – our vitality slowly seeps out of us, leaving a thin, irritable shell.

It has been two years since my father had passed away, and I had not dared to come sooner. Yet delay was no longer an option.

The sale completed last week, and I had three months to save all that I treasured and leave the rest behind. I suppose normal people would not have waited two years to do this. They would comb through their belongings soon after the funeral, smiling at a sentimental picture or the well-worn coat, still warm with their scent. They would not have thrown anything way so soon, no, not yet. But there would come a time when things would be released naturally – a trinket here, a book there. Yet I had not set foot in this house for ten years, and all at once the weight of absence presses upon me. Perhaps it was the fear that if I stripped the house of his belongings, then it would erase his memory and presence. So much of our life is manifested in tangible objects. Our homes are filled to the brim with little items that define who we are – the books we keep on our shelves, the teas we store in our pantry, and the art that we hang on the wall. Without such things, what could someone truly say about us?

The path from the gate to the house was riddled with dried shoots, spilling ceaselessly from nearby bushes. Thorns jutted upward, and vines cradled the old willow trees with reverence. I had no choice but to push through the bushes flanking the path. After a long stretch, I was greeted by the house.

Not much had changed, I thought. Whether that was a good thing, I was not sure. Perhaps if the house was tattered beyond recognition, I could avoid the pool of memories spilling beyond the door. I clutched tighter at the bags I carried. Only two small bags. After today, I told myself, I will leave, and I will never come back. I cannot face this house again.

Standing in the foyer, I paused, unsure where to begin. The stairs to my right led to the hallway which housed my bedroom. There, I thought. I hurried up the stairs, and turned to my right, not bothering to switch on the lights. With every step, motes of dust sighed into the air. I always hated how those stairs creaked, warning my father whenever I tried to sneak out at night. I opened the door to my bedroom and dropped the bags on the floor and walked towards my bed. I sat on my mattress for a few minutes, glancing around the room with a strange unfamiliarity, as if I had not spent my childhood within these walls. I had not expected that forgetting would ache in the same way remembering did. I wanted to feel the connection to my teenage self, the way she would stare up at the ceiling every night before falling into a deep sleep. I wanted to meet here again, and so I laid my head on the pillow, only to feel something sharp pressed against my head. Who was she, really? What clothes did she wear? How did her hair look? What was the name of her best friend? All those memories aged with time and now they sit beneath the same dust that gathers on my bed.

From behind the pillow, I extracted a little notebook – my diary. I smiled, flipping through the pages and seeing my handwriting crammed about the pages. “Math is evil and so is Dad.” I read aloud, feeling a sudden rush of heat in my cheeks. Every night, after my father had turned out all the lights, I would look the door, light a candle and write until the flame would flicker and die. I did not care about the smudges or the childish, slating strokes my pen left on the pages. I wanted to complain about everything – my school, my chores and my homework. But I complained about my father most of all.

My father was a lonely man. He confined himself to his bedroom and his study, occasionally venturing into other parts of the house. He would often bring me tea after school, but he would sit on my chair, waiting for me to say something, when all I would want was to shut off the world. After ten minutes of silence, he would slowly get up and retreat to his room.

Still, he would try almost every day.

My chair was still here, angled towards my bed, but I felt myself avoiding it entirely. I circled around my room, picking up this and that, stuffing them into my bag. As I walked, I traced my fingers on the furniture. The person who lived here was different. She was bright, but she found fault with everything. I only wish I had known then — life was as good as it would ever be. There are so many things I wish I could have said to her, but I doubt she would want to hear anything I had to say. I was so far from what I hoped to become. I wonder if my father ever felt like this – trapped in a life of his own creation, unable to change the past yet unable to veer from the future.

I left my bedroom, wandering aimlessly before coming upon his study. I stood by the doorway and peered inside. The air was saturated with a stale scent wafting from the old books crammed onto the bookshelves. The thick velvet curtains were drawn shut.

“You always liked to keep it dark in here.” I said aloud, though no one was listening.

I tiptoed into the room. He spent almost all of his time here, writing and muttering to himself. Sure, he wrote a few books, but does that really matter now that he is gone? If all he left behind were some titles bearing his name, how can we tell what sort of life he lived? Do such things become legacy if no one remains to remember the name they carry, or the man that carries it?

The red carpet, thin with use, padded my footsteps, and I allowed myself to pick a few things from the shelves. Eventually, I stopped in front of his desk. Scripts and crumpled papers were strewn about the surface, resembling an artist’s workspace. My father was indeed an artist. His canvas was a blank page, and his paintbrush was his favourite fountain pen. Word after word, he would craft elaborate stories, full of mythical creatures, magic and swordfights. Sometimes, when he was in an unusually jolly mood, he would sit me down by the fire in the living room and read a piece he wrote. The sky would darken, and the tea would cool while his voice conjured worlds beyond our own. Once, after he finished reading a piece to me, he said “Time pass, but a good story lasts.” If it was true, then what story does his life tell?

He poured hours and hours of his time into these volumes. He rarely lifted a finger around the house, for we had a housekeeper and a cook who lived on the grounds. He never laughed, never cried. He did not come to my school performances, nor did he help with my homework. The only times he truly saw me were the afternoons he sat on the chair by my bed, waiting for stories about my day.

A man full of stories, yet not one was his own. He wrote of fantastical heroes who crossed realms and slayed dragons, of kings and queens who shaped kingdoms with their bare hands. But he never wrote about his own life. Never his own stories. What would there be to say?

Death is ordinary and simple. Grief is anything but.

We turn over memories again and again, reliving moments we shared with them. That is all we have left - memories, fragments of existence, smells and sounds. We try to snatch at them before they fade into shadow.

But what happens when all our shared moments could be written on only a few pages? Then grief begins to invent. It conjures new memories – imagined ones, false ones. The what ifs.  They are the cruellest of all, for we build stories in our mind and mourn what never was.

That is his legacy – fiction. Fiction in the books he wrote, and in the stories I had invented to explain my pain, to soften it, to let it go.

These stories remind me that legacy is not only what’s left behind but also what was never there at all. It lingers in the cologne clinging to the hallway air, the books with his name on the spine, his coat still resting on its hook. But it also lives in the silence – the silence of the study, the chair beside my bed, the gaze he cast through the window as I played in the garden with the housekeeper. His quiet presence. His absence. All of it was him. All of it is his legacy.

Perhaps there was a grain of truth in that story. Legacy, after all, is the mark that extends beyond one’s physical presence. The way my chest ached when I imagine him being an attentive parent was part of it. His empty chair at the dining table was also part of it. This was the hole he left behind – a lot of books and a lot of unsaid things.

I could not change that. And so, I grieved. I grieved the wholeness of his legacy – for the tangible impact he left behind and for my unmet hopes. I grieved because for the first time, no matter how forcefully I pray, or how much I do, I could not change the simple fact that he is gone, and that my longing will remain forever unanswered.

Of course it hurts. It was the reason why I avoided this house for so long after his death. But pain does not mean something is broken. It means something mattered. It means he mattered. Fear of feeling is a natural part of grief. It is the part of grief that causes us to flinch from what was, or try to rewrite it into something neater, kinder or softer.

That is grief: the acknowledgement that life’s fluidity has ended. We are left with only what remains in our hands. No more, no less.

We had woven our threads into the fabric of life, yet we ached for the days when the yarn was still whole, and the loom lay before us—when we were ready to shape the world. We could carry this regret with us, or we could close our hands around what we had, feel its weight, and carry it forward.

For two years after his death, I could not even step inside this house. It was easier to stay away, to pretend the past had sealed itself like a jar left on a high shelf. Only when the time came to sell did I finally unscrew the cap and let the air of memory rush out. Even then, the walls seemed to breathe with his silence, and I was afraid of what I might find—not only in what he left behind, but in what was never between us. We had never been close, and that absence was its own presence.

I lowered my gaze to the table, noticing the pens and paper strewn about. His favourite fountain pen sat on the desk, its ink long dried. It struck me with a pang of memory, yet it was also just his pen. The path was set and walked. I could step onto it and, remember him—not with fear, but with quiet acceptance.

Perhaps, in the end, that is all we are—vessels for memory. We project it onto things and hold them tightly against our chest. We flinch from looking too closely, and that is okay. Memory is a sword we pierce into ourselves each time we recall. It will continue to hurt—not because something is broken, but because something mattered.

And yet, the loom remained before me. The threads I carried—his absence, my regret, the ache in my chest—were not the whole tapestry. They were only strands. I could weave them in and create something new. That was what grief became when it moved: not an unraveling, but a reshaping. We moved forward, not in spite of grief, but with it—shaping our path with every word we said, every silence we left behind, and every thread we chose to draw through the weave of our lives.

One day, someone else would trace their hand along the fabric we had made and wonder what it meant to us, and what it now meant to them.