A Fragment From the Other Side — A Handful of Remembrance (Patreon)

Leah keeps a small bowl of coffee beans on her desk, sometimes a tin left open. She never brews them. The beans are not for drinking.

The scent is more than enough.

It is said that smell is the sense most tightly bound to memory. Faces soften over centuries; voices fade. But the aroma of roasted coffee still finds her the way it always did. Early mornings, a warm kitchen, the sound of someone who loved her moving quietly through the house so as not to wake her.

She has never told most people what it means.

But on the days when time feels particularly vast, and the people she has lost feel particularly distant, she sits close to that bowl and lets herself remember her mother's hands wrapped around a mug, the way she would compliment the smell, and the particular quietness of the home she once loved.