The hollow squares

A story for every child who grew up waiting for words their fathers never learned to say.

The photograph gathered dust on the mantle, its shadows etched in silence. A father and son facing one another, frozen in a moment that never quite touched warmth. The man’s figure was carved with hollow squares, like pieces of his soul had been offered away. The boy stood whole, yet distant, his chest aglow with something faint, as if it had only just begun to burn.

Tommy was raised not with stories, but with the hum of overworked radiators, the rattle of keys in the door at midnight, the hiss of a pan heating canned soup. His father, Gerald, was a man shaped by absence. His face looked like it had forgotten how to smile, and his eyes were always half-closed, like he was shielding himself from the light of his own regrets.

There were no bedtime tales in their home. Just flickering TV screens, the occasional clink of glass, and the scent of sweat and steel from long shifts at the plant. Gerald had once painted with oil and fire. He could mix colors with the sensitivity of a musician tuning strings. But when life hit when debts piled and dreams died, he packed away his brushes like a man burying a part of his own voice.

Tommy remembered the first and last time he showed his father a drawing. A boy reaching for a tree where no birds sang. Gerald looked for barely a second and mumbled, “Looks good.” Tommy had waited longer for that response than he did for Christmas.

That night, he ripped the drawing to pieces and flushed it down the toilet.
Each scrap felt like a square missing from his father now lived inside of him.
Years passed. The silence hardened like old plaster.

But one afternoon, the air was thick with coming rain, heavy, metallic, like something about to break. Gerald knocked on Tommy’s door. His voice, when it came, was like sandpaper against skin. “Can I come in?”

He stood in the doorway like a shadow unsure of its shape. In his hand was a leather journal, bound and worn, fraying at the corners. “ I didn’t know how to say things,” he said, voice cracking like glass under strain. “But I wrote… when I could.”

Tommy waited until the house was still to read it. Each page carried breath: “I wanted to teach you how to fix pipes, but I didn’t know how to stop myself from breaking.”

“I love you like breath, but I speak like bricks.” “ The pieces missing in me… I gave them to keep you from falling apart.” Tommy didn’t cry. He let the silence hold him, like a father finally learning to cradle.

The next morning, a drawing sat on the table. Two silhouettes, standing in the rain. The father, still broken in squares. The son, glowing, not because he was whole, but because he had been seen.

Beneath it was a note, written in ink that trembled like a voice learning to speak:
“ You don’t have to be whole to give me something real”