The Hush Garden

The house breathed as it always did at bedtime, moving slow as wool. Outside the streetlights kept their patient, drowsy watch and the trees let the night push through their branches in soft, brushing waves. Inside, the lamp on the hallway table let off a last, amber sigh before Mae switched it and the world narrowed to the small, warm square of Nora's bed. The blanket rose and fell like a comfortable thought. Mae's hands straightened the sheet, tucked the corners with careful fingers, and leaned close to press a cheek to Nora's temple for a single, solid second.

Nora closed her eyes because that was part of the ritual—close eyes, count small things, imagine the window holding everything safe. But tonight, when she closed her eyes, the usual quiet felt thin, as if someone had brushed a sleeve across a thick curtain and it slid away. The hush she had always felt like a soft coat folded beside her bed seemed lighter, not settled into the room the way it usually was. The pipes in the wall made distant, sleepy clicks. A car far down the lane whispered past and left a small, metallic sigh. Even the curtains sounded like they might want to be louder than they were.

Mae's voice lingered in the doorway, steady as a low bell. "Sleep now, love. Little breaths, in and out." Her feet left a soft memory on the floor as she closed the door. The sound of the lock turning was the last grown-up thing to happen. Nora clutched the edge of her blanket and tried to make the hush come back by thinking of familiar things—Mae's kettle in the evening, the picture of the cat with a crooked ear, the way the bathtub smelled like lemon. She breathed, but the breath felt like it needed to find its place.

She listened like someone learning a new language. The quiet had a pattern she usually could follow: a slow hover right above the bed, a small, steady pause after each exhale. Tonight the pattern was off. When she breathed out, there was only a thinness, a small hollow where the soft coat should be. It made her feel as if the room had moved away a little and left an empty pocket by her pillow. She tried to tuck her toes into the blanket, to fold herself into a tighter shape where the hush might hunt it down, and imagined the hush as something she could call like a friend. It did not come.

Nora whispered her own name, not loud enough to wake the house, but loud enough to feel like an invitation. She said it under the blanket so the room would hear the word and know she needed its usual kindness. A mouse in the wall shuffled; someone on the next street cleared their throat and then stopped; a clock two houses over knocked once and then went quiet again. All the ordinary sounds were still there, but they seemed to be in a different key, somewhere outside the reach of the small sound that used to hold everything together. Nora felt smaller than the hush had ever allowed her to be, as if the hush made an inside for her to live in and it had gone to the next room for a moment.