THE SHAPE OF WHAT’S MISSING
ALM No.94, October 2026
SHORT STORIES
Rienez always felt something was wrong with him. An uneasy feeling, like, something is missing, a hollow feeling. He was a simple man, living in a simple town, the town of Ziren. Although the town sometimes acted weird, not following common senses. But no one seemed to notice anything. he almost started to live under the impression that he was simply a young man of erratic fortune living in a town where the physics were notoriously unreliable. It was a peculiar life, certainly. Doors sometimes opened onto brick walls because the carpenter had forgotten to finish the hallway; market days were frequently interrupted by sudden, unseasonable showers of black silk umbrellas; and the local weather report was often amended mid-afternoon with a heavy stroke of graphite that crossed out the word sunshine and replaced it with dense, weeping fog.
Yet Rienez had accepted these irregularities with the dull, weary resilience of someone who knew no other baseline. He assumed the world was merely eccentric, governed by laws too grand or too chaotic for an ordinary mind to parse. Until the first real fissure in that comforting illusion appeared on a random Sunday.
It was a ordinary day. Rienez was procrastinating, sitting on a wooden bench, looking at the oak tree at distance. Suddenly, the tree looked like it was being erased. And within a few seconds, it completely disappeared. The tree was always there since he was born, unchanged. That tree disappeared. The tree was gone.
Not felled, not burned, not carried off in the night by some drunken argument between neighbours — gone, the way a word goes when a tongue forgets it mid-sentence. Rienez sat on the bench a long moment with his mouth open around nothing, waiting for his eyes to finish their joke. They did not. The grass where the oak had stood for longer than he had been alive lay flat and unbothered, as if it had never known the weight of roots. He was on his feet before he decided to stand. He ran first to Mrs. Zani, who kept the bakery and always remembered how he liked his bread — a little burnt, the way his mother used to — though tonight when he said the oak, the big oak by the green, where is it, she only tilted her head like a bird deciding whether a sound was worth answering. "There's never been a tree there, dear," she said, and went on wiping flour from the counter in the same slow circle she had been wiping before he came in.
He asked the tanner. He asked the boy who sold pins at the corner, and the old man who did nothing all day but watch the road as if the road might eventually apologize to him. He asked the priest, who touched the wooden rail of the church as though for comfort and said, gently, that Rienez should get some rest. Each of them answered the same way, in different words that meant the same thing, with the same small pause before speaking, the same faint smile that did not reach anywhere behind their eyes. It was not that they lied to him. It was that none of them seemed to understand there was anything to lie about. Something in that sameness frightened him more than the tree's absence ever could. A town could lose a tree. He was not sure a town could lose fifty separate people's memory of it, unless the memory itself had never truly belonged to them — unless they were, in some manner he had no word for, reciting. The hollow feeling that had lived quietly under his ribs his whole life woke up and began to stretch. It grew heavier with each door that shut politely in his face, until it sat on his chest like a stone dropped from a great height, until breathing became a task he had to think about to complete. He ran. He did not choose to run; his legs simply decided that standing still with that stone on his chest was no longer survivable. He ran past the crooked hallway that ended in brick, past a sky that someone, somewhere, was even now amending with grey, and he did not stop until he came again to the green, to the flattened, guiltless grass where the oak used to hold up the sky.
He stepped onto the place where the trunk had been.
And the world declined to follow him in.
There was no light and no dark, because both of those require something to happen to. There was no ground beneath him and no falling, because falling needs a place to land. He opened his mouth and there was no mouth to open, or there was, but sound had been quietly uninvented. He tried to think his own name and found that thought itself required a self to do the thinking, and he was no longer entirely sure a self was included in whatever he currently was. What was left was not thought and not sensation but something older than both — a fear with no edges, endless in every direction, the fear of a candle for the wind, the fear of ink for water. He was being subtracted. He could not scream it and could not understand it and could not do anything at all except be erased, slowly, patiently, by nothing.
Then, something black came.
It did not have a shape so much as a direction, a tearing motion through whatever that non-place was made of, and it closed around him the way a hand closes around a moth, and it threw him.
He landed hard on real grass, real dirt, real bruising pain, and gasped a real breath that hurt his real lungs, and for one merciful second he was only a body again, only that.
Then the memories arrived, all at once, the way water arrives when a dam simply stops existing.
A woman with paint under her fingernails, always, no matter how many times she scrubbed. A woman laughing at a canvas of a sky she'd gotten wrong on purpose, she said, because true skies were arrogant and needed humbling. A woman who called him her whole heart walking around outside her body, who kissed the top of his head every single morning like it was a ritual that kept the sun rising. A woman who loved a man — there had been a man, surely, there must have been a man, warmth and a low laugh and hands that smelled of cedar — but when Rienez reached for his face, there was nothing
there to reach. No father. Only the shape of an absence where a father should have been, cut cleanly out, like a figure scissored from a photograph. He lay in the grass and understood, with the calm horror of a man watching his own house burn from a great distance, that he did not have a mother. Not here. Not ever, in this town, in this life. He had simply — begun. On a Sunday. A Sunday very much like this one. The hollow feeling did not shrink now that it had a name. It grew a new companion instead: a yearning so sudden and so total that it bent him forward in the grass with his arms around his own ribs. He wanted his mother the way a hand wants to be attached to an arm. But beneath even that, underneath the grief for a woman he had only just learned to miss, there rose something stranger — a longing for a presence he could not picture and had certainly never met, a woman not of this world, and yet the ache for her sat in exactly the place where recognition should be, warm and old and absurdly, impossibly familiar, as if they had loved each other since before either of them had been given a shape.
He did not decide to go looking for her. He simply stood, and his feet already knew the direction, the way a compass needle knows north without ever having visited it. He returned to the place where the oak had stood and where, hours ago, a blank nothing had tried to erase him. The blankness was gone. In its place, where there should have been the ordinary green of Ziren, there now opened something else entirely — a forest that had no clear edge, folding without warning into meadow and folding back again, the two never quite deciding which of them the land belonged to. Grass grew tall as wheat and then, three steps later, gave way to moss-quiet trees whose canopies let down long coins of green-gold light. The air smelled of rain that had not yet fallen. Somewhere close and somewhere far at once, water moved without a river to carry it. It was, in its impossible way, achingly beautiful, and Rienez walked into it with his chest still full of that unbearable double ache — grief behind him, yearning ahead — and did not once think to be afraid of the beauty, only grateful for it, the way a man dying of thirst is grateful for rain regardless of the storm that brought it.
It was on the second or third day — he had already stopped trusting his sense of days — that he noticed the thoughts arriving strangely. He would feel a feeling, and a half-breath later the words for that feeling would arrive already finished, already polished into sentences no unpracticed mind should be able to produce so cleanly. He knelt once beside a still black pool to drink and saw, in the water instead of his own face, a line of fine grey script rippling across the surface: he knelt once beside a still black pool to drink. He startled back. The water only smoothed itself and waited, patient as paper waiting for a pen.
He understood then, all at once and with a kind of vertigo that had nothing to do with the ground, that he was not a man walking through a forest. He was a sentence walking through other sentences. He had never had a mother because no one had ever written him one. The town of Ziren broke its own rules because the hand governing it had grown careless, or bored, or simply human, capable of forgetting to finish a hallway. Every doubt he had ever felt about himself — that hollow, that missing thing — was not sickness. It was the truth of him, plainly stated: he had a shape, and somewhere the shape had an author, and he wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to stand before her.
So he kept walking, though the forest did not make it easy.
The ancient things that lived there did not have faces or names he could hold, only soft floating motes of light glimpsed at the corners of his vision, gone before he could turn to meet them fully — old, old life, life that had perhaps been drafted into being before the very idea of a forest had been decided upon, and left in the margins ever since. They did not attack him. They did not help him. They simply continued, luminous and unbothered, sharing the world with him the way stars share a sky with a traveller who will never reach them. The land did the hurting on its own. Roots turned to knives when he was tired enough to stumble. A ravine he misjudged in fading light took the skin from his palms and, on a worse night than that, took his left eye entirely, the world narrowing forever after into a single flat window, one half of the beautiful green forest simply gone from him the way the oak tree had gone from Ziren — a small, private echo of the first wound that had set him walking. He wept over it only once, briefly, and then kept going, because grief, he was discovering, could be carried the same way a wound could be carried, folded into the body and turned, slowly, into something almost like grace. He was thinner with every mile and more scarred and somehow — he could not explain this to himself — more himself, as though the forest were not taking pieces of him away so much as burning off everything that had never truly belonged to his shape in the first place. At the very end of the world, where the meadow finally ran out of ground and
the trees thinned into something like the last page of a very long book, he found a seam. It was barely visible, a hairline of white light where the green of the forest met something that was not the forest at all. He pressed his ruined hands against it, and it gave, the way a wall gives when it was never truly a wall to begin with, only a sentence someone had not finished, and he pushed himself through, small in that vastness, standing in the open air of a place his whole life had never been built to hold him.
He stood there, one-eyed, scarred, barely as tall as a child, in front of the writer.
She had not slept well in three nights.
Her desk held a pen gone dry twice over, a notepad crossed out into near illegibility, and a desktop whose cursor blinked patiently in the center of a paragraph she had rewritten fourteen times and still did not trust. She wanted, more than she had wanted almost anything else in her adult life, to write something that mattered — not merely a story that entertained, but one that lodged itself somewhere behind a stranger's ribs and stayed there for years, uninvited, the way certain griefs do. She was, she privately admitted, a little obsessed with the word masterpiece, and obsession of that particular flavour
tends to make a person cruel to their own work before they ever get the chance to be cruel to anyone else.
She had set the pen down at last and simply looked — not at the page, but past it, into the shape of the story the way one looks into weather, trying to feel which way it wanted to break. She thought of the boy she'd been building
for months. She thought about what she truly wanted from him: not comfort, not safety, but haunting — something beautiful enough to ache, and memorable enough that a reader, ten years on, would still occasionally think of him without warning, the way you think of someone you failed to save.
And then, without her hand moving toward the pen at all, the story kept going.
Lines assembled themselves ahead of her, faster than she could have written them, faster than she could quite believe. She sat back, unnerved, watching
sentences she had not yet chosen appear anyway, and before she could decide what to feel about that, the page itself seemed to fold outward like a door opening the wrong way — and a boy climbed out of it. He was very small, barely the size a child that age should have been, with hair the pale gold of late afternoon and eyes the soft, wrong, beautiful color of lavender, one of them scarred shut. He stood on her desk among the crossed-out pages, breathing hard, staring at her as though she were the sun
after a long winter. She did not move. She did not entirely believe her own eyes. But she did not look away either.
He talked and talked, because he had carried so far to be allowed to talk at all.
He told her about the tree that disappeared and the town that lied without knowing it lied. He told her about the blank place that had tried to erase him and the black shape that had thrown him free of it. He told her about the
mother he had never had and the ache for her that still sat behind his ribs like a stone that would not warm. He told her about the forest, the losses, the eye, the seam of light — every mile of it — because he believed, with the whole unguarded hope of something that had only recently learned it was allowed to hope, that if he simply explained himself clearly enough, she would understand, and understanding, surely, would become mending. He wanted her to fix him. He wanted, more quietly, more shamefully than that, for her to look at him the way his lost, invented mother had looked at him in the memory that was never truly his — like he was a heart that happened to be walking around outside a body.
The writer listened to every word. Her eyes did not leave him once. But she said almost nothing back, and the almost-nothing she did say gave him no comfort at all, because she was already turning over, behind that quiet
face, a decision she did not want to make. She knew — had always known, on some level beneath the pen — that a story given everything it wanted was a story that left no mark. The stories that lasted, the ones that lodged behind
ribs and stayed, were the ones that cost something impossible to get back. She wanted that kind of story. She had asked for that kind of story with her whole obsessive heart. She only had not expected, until this exact moment,
that the cost would have a face, and lavender eyes, and would be looking up at her like she might still be kind.
She noticed it before he did — a faint smudging at the very edge of him, as if someone, somewhere behind the visible world, had rested a thumb against wet ink and dragged it, only slightly, only once. It was not there and then it was, the way a stain arrives on cloth. His outline had begun, so gently it could almost be mistaken for a trick of the light, to blur. He was fading. Slower than the blank place had taken him — this was not a devouring, it was a thinning — but fading all the same, and some part of him that had walked an entire forest to reach her understood, with dread pooling cold beneath the hope, exactly what that meant. The writer felt the guilt land on her like a physical weight, because every writer, whatever else they are willing to sacrifice, loves the thing they made, however small, however broken, however inconvenient that love turns out to be. She hated what she was about to do. She decided, in the same breath, that she would not let him see the hating — that if anyone in this story was to be remembered as the villain, it would be her, cleanly, entirely, so that he would never have to carry the added weight of understanding she had not wanted this either.
"You have two choices," she said, and made her voice cold on purpose, because cold was easier to survive than tender cruelty. "You can be erased completely. Or you can be completely rewritten." A pause, because even cruelty deserved to be exact. "If you choose the second, you will not be Rienez anymore. Not really. Not ever again."
Everything stopped.
Not just Rienez — the whole moment seemed to freeze around him, the blinking cursor suspended mid-blink, the desk lamp's light gone thin and still, as though the entire small universe of that room had paused out of some final courtesy to let him feel this fully, without mercy, without interruption. He did not think, at first. He only felt his own life arrive in front of him all at once, complete and small and already ending — the mother he had grieved without ever holding, the town that had never truly known him, the forest, the eye, the impossible ache for a woman he had crossed a whole invented world to find, only to learn that she would be the one to end him after all. Tears came without his permission, sliding down a face that might not exist by morning, and he did not wipe them away, because some part of him understood, distantly, that this — this exact grief, standing in the air, small and shaking in front of his maker — might be the truest and last thing he would ever get to feel as himself. He stood there a long, long moment. Then, with his whole broken heart plainly on his face, he chose the second option. I'm so cruel, aren't I, the writer thought, and did not let herself say it aloud, and picked her pen back up with a hand that was not quite steady. A cold wind moved through the room, though every window was shut.
He wakes up without a mother, without a memory older than the letter he is currently standing on. There has always been something wrong with him, and this time he will not be given a whole forest to learn why. The rain over the city he does not yet know he lives in is already turning, on the very first page, into something that will not stop.
Zerin Omar Samara is a writer from Bangladesh and an English student at the University of Dhaka. She writes literary speculative and strange fiction, often exploring identity, memory, absence, and the uncanny within ordinary lives.
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