Passion Fruit, Squash With Healed Hole On Side, Reflections Of Other Rooms Behind Distant Walls

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In a quiet parlor where no one had spoken for decades, the still life sat—unmoving, immaculate, and impossibly alive. The silver urn caught in its mirrored belly not just the light of the room, but the dim glow of places that no longer existed. Behind its polished surface, one could almost see corridors stretching into other houses, other centuries—rooms where clocks still ticked, where candles burned down to waxy nubs, where people leaned toward each other and whispered things they’d never repeat.

The squash sat at the center, its skin golden and imperfect, a healed scar tracing along one side. It was not a wound from the knife or the field—it was something older, stranger. As if it had once been hollowed out and then remembered itself whole again. Beside it, the passion fruit rested in its bruised green shell, soft with ripeness, a small world of sweetness hidden inside.

Each object held its own silence, its own confession. The chain that draped across the drawer once belonged to a watch, and the watch to a man who promised to return before the war ended. He never did. The glass goblet had been raised once in laughter, the sound of which seemed trapped still in its crystalline bowl, an echo folded into transparency.

At certain hours—especially near dusk—the reflections began to move. The light would shift, and the silver urn’s surface would tremble with distant figures: a woman in a red dress crossing a hallway; a child chasing a wooden hoop; a man closing a door softly behind him. These were not ghosts, exactly, but residues of gesture—memories the metal had kept after seeing too much.

The squash, with its scar healed smooth, was the heart of it all. It had been cut open once in a kitchen long forgotten, and in that opening, something unspeakable had entered—a kind of seeing. Now it grew more solid each year, as though ripening on the table instead of rotting. The air around it shimmered faintly, and even the fruit beside it seemed to lean toward its gravity.

Visitors never noticed. They admired the composition, the balance of golds and silvers, the soft play of shadow on the folded cloth. But if one lingered too long, if one breathed too slowly, a strange awareness came over them—the feeling of being observed not by eyes, but by the room itself.

For behind those distant walls, in those mirrored chambers, something still watched through time, through reflection, through the curve of an unbroken surface. It saw the passion fruit, it saw the squash with its healed wound, and it saw you, standing there, part of the stillness, already becoming another image in the chain of forgotten rooms.

And when you turned away, the metal cooled. The reflections dimmed. But the squash remained—whole, waiting, remembering what it once was.