Reunion at the Hollow Table
The invitation arrived as a folded envelope browned by years, sealed with wax that smelled faintly of pine and rain. It spoke of a family gathering at the old house by the creek, where the elm trees whispered in the wind and the table in the dining room wore its name like a secret no one dared to spill: the Hollow Table. Generations had gathered there to share meals and memories, but the room knew how to keep a secret better than any diary. Tonight, the family would return to listen, and maybe to be listened to, too, by something that waited in the grain between the boards.
When the clock struck seven and the door sighed shut behind the last arriving cousin, the air grew thick with dust and memory. The table, a single slab of wood curved by time, breathed as if it had lungs. Candles flickered, casting tall shadows that stretched toward the ceiling like fingers reaching for a confession. The grandmother’s portrait above the sideboard blinked once in a way that felt almost human, and a distant, rustling murmur rose from the hollow center of the table, as if the wood itself were listening to each footstep and deciding who deserved to speak.
“We do not tell stories to be believed,” a voice seemed to whisper from the grain. “We tell stories so the truth can finish itself.”
- Grandfather’s chair bears a narrow seam that once swallowed a letter he never sent, foreshadowing a debt the family would rather forget.
- Aunt Mara carries a dish that tastes like rain and old photographs, a recipe that makes memories melt on the tongue.
- Uncle Theo pours wine that gleams with a pale fire, as if the bottle were storing small suns for later use.
As the plates cleared, a hush settled over the table. The Hollow Table began to hum, a low, approving purr that rose and fell with the rhythm of the family’s breathing. Each person found their name etched into the wood—their birthdays, their mistakes, the promises kept and broken—written in a language older than the family itself. The room seemed to lean in, listening for a confession that would satisfy the appetite of the wood. And when the voices began, they sounded not like the living but like echoes recycling the past into a present tense that felt dangerously permanent.
The youngest cousin spoke first, a timid confession about a lie told to avoid punishment; the table absorbed it, and a faint, honeyed glow spread through the grain. Then a grandmother’s memory—half-remembered, half-made—spooled forward, and the wine glass trembled in its holder as if the table had pressed a finger to its rim and asked for more truth. The family’s history unfurled in fragments: a summer wedding that never happened, a debt paid in silence, a door that stayed shut when it should have opened. Each truth released a new crack in the wood, and the Hollow Table offered a patient, unblinking witness in return.
When the last voice trembled to a stop, the room held its breath. The table’s hollow seemed to inhale, drawing in the final veil of darkness that clung to the family’s past. The narrator realized with a sudden, cold clarity that this reunion was not about catching up but about being measured by the thing they had become: part of a lineage that fed on secrets. In that moment, the narrator’s own name flickered at the edge of the grain, a final invitation or perhaps a sentence. The Hollow Table waited, and the last confession would decide who stayed seated and who drifted away into the echoing hall beyond the doorway.