WHERE THE DUST COLLECTS

By Lola Dam.

After the funeral, they came back to the house.

Not because they wanted to. Because there was nowhere else to go.

Mara and her brother stood in the living room like guests in someone else’s grief. Everything looked the same, and everything had changed.

Their father’s boots still sat by the door. His coffee mug, chipped and pale green, rested on the windowsill. On the armchair was the book he’d been halfway through—a detective novel with yellowed edges and a receipt tucked inside.

She picked up the mug. It was still warm, somehow. Or maybe that was her hand.

“Do we start packing now?” her brother asked.

Mara didn’t answer.

She walked into the kitchen. The scent of dust and citrus lingered. Their father had always cleaned with vinegar, claiming it cut through both grime and ghosts. She opened a drawer and found a rubber band ball, a broken tape measure, and a tiny envelope with her name on it.

She didn’t open it. Not yet.

Instead, she sat at the table and looked around. At the sunspots on the floorboards. At the tiny crack in the ceiling that had been there since she was nine. At the spice rack, he alphabetized after her mother left.

He had always said, “Where the dust collects, the heart lingers.”

It used to annoy her. As if grief could be poetic. As if cobwebs meant love.

But now, sitting there, she understood.

The places he never dusted—those were the places he touched most often.

The radio dial.

The pantry door.

The framed photograph of her, age five, holding a frog in one hand and beaming.

She ran her finger across the photo’s edge and felt the powdery weight of dust.

In the hallway, she found his coat still on its hook. Inside the pocket: a peppermint, a receipt from the corner shop, and a note that said simply, “M — Remember to plant the lavender.”

She pressed the paper to her chest.

Outside, her brother was sweeping the porch.

He didn’t believe in rituals. He said grief was a thing you move through like a corridor—fast and with purpose, so it doesn’t catch you.

Mara moved more slowly.

She wandered into the attic, where dust settled in thick sighs. Her father’s handwriting labelled every box: Christmas, Tax Papers, Things Too Good To Throw Away.

One box was marked Mara — Small Things.

She opened it.

Inside: a barrette she lost in second grade, a postcard she sent from a school trip, a torn ticket stub from her first play, her childhood drawing of a stick figure labelled “Me + Dad Forever.”

She sat on the floor. Let the air settle around her like memory.

When she opened the envelope from the kitchen, the letter inside was only a few lines:

“I didn’t always know how to say it out loud. But I was proud. Always. You’ll know what to do next.”

She folded the letter slowly and carefully, like folding a bird from paper.

She did know.

Not about the mortgage or the will or the formal parts of leaving. But she knew what he’d meant.

She would keep the radio.

The mug.

The photograph.

And she would plant the lavender.

Out back, where the sun caught the corner of the garden. Where dust gathered in golden patches. Where her father used to kneel and hum and pretend not to cry when the tomatoes failed.

She knelt there too, hands in soil, and whispered the names of everything she remembered.

The smell of his flannel shirt.

The way he overcooked eggs.

How he used to say “We’re just small things trying to love big.”

The wind stirred. Dust rose and danced in the sun like it had something to say.

And Mara listened.