My Father's Voice in the Attic.

It started with a voice—soft, unmistakable, and impossibly familiar. I was alone in the house, brushing dust from old photo albums in the parlor, when I heard it. A low murmur floated down from the attic, like a conversation overheard through a wall.

My heart stuttered.

It had been three years since my father passed away. The funeral was quiet, somber—just as he would have wanted. He was a private man, a writer of some small renown in his day, and he’d lived most of his final years holed up in this very house, surrounded by papers and silence.

Now that Mom had moved into a smaller place, it fell on me to sort through everything. The house still smelled faintly of pipe smoke and ink.

I told myself I imagined it. The wind maybe, or the moan of the old beams settling under the June heat. I went back to organizing the old letters.

Then I heard it again. This time, clearer:

“Anna…”

My name.

I froze. My father’s voice. Raspy, deep, unmistakable.

He used to call my name that way when I was little, when he found me buried under a pile of books in the corner of the study, or when I’d fallen asleep on the sofa while he wrote late into the night.

I stood, grabbed the flashlight, and made my way up the creaky stairs. The attic door groaned on its hinges as I pulled it open. The warm air hit me like a wave, thick with dust and old paper.

“Dad?” I called, feeling ridiculous.

Nothing.

The attic looked the same as always—stacked boxes, a few old paintings, yellowed newspaper clippings of his book reviews pinned to the rafters. And then I noticed it: the typewriter.

His old black Remington sat in the middle of the attic floor. I was sure it hadn’t been there before.

Slowly, I approached. A single sheet of paper was fed into the carriage. On it, one line typed in the faded ink of a ribbon long expired:

“I'm not gone, Anna.”

My hands trembled. The key bars were cold to the touch, unmoving.

I looked around, heart thumping. Dust clung to every surface, undisturbed. No footprints but mine.

I backed away, closed the attic door behind me, and didn’t sleep that night.


---

The next day, curiosity won over fear. I returned with gloves, a mask, and determination. If someone was playing tricks on me, I needed to know.

I searched the attic thoroughly. No speakers, no electronics. No prankster hiding in the boxes. But the typewriter? It had more pages.

One each day.

Each with a new line in his voice, his phrasing, the kind of poetic insight only my father could produce.

“You always understood the silence between words.”
“There are stories I never told you, Anna.”
“You are the final chapter I never got to write.”

It became a ritual. Each morning I climbed into the attic and read what he’d left behind.

And then came the day the typewriter stopped. The last page sat there with a single sentence:

“Look beneath the floorboards.”

My breath caught. I hesitated. But something deeper than fear pushed me forward.

I pried up the floorboards near the typewriter, coughing as dust billowed around me. There, wrapped in oilskin and bound with string, was a manuscript.

The title page read: "For Anna – The Story of Us"

It was a memoir—his memoir. A deeply personal, beautiful, and painfully honest chronicle of his life, his regrets, and his love for me and Mom. Things he never said aloud. Stories he never shared.

I read through the night, tears soaking the final pages.


---

When the publisher saw the manuscript, they wept too. “It’s his masterpiece,” they said. “A voice from beyond.”

But I knew better.

It wasn’t a ghost story. It was love—my father’s final act of connection. Somehow, some way, he had waited until I was ready to hear it.

And now, whenever I sit quietly, I sometimes hear the clack of old typewriter keys, echoing faintly from the attic above.