“The Quiet Draft”

The retreat was called Stillwater, though there was no water anywhere nearby. Just pine, hills, and a lingering scent of moss that clung to everything—your sweaters, your skin, even the notebooks you left on the porch overnight.

Twelve writers had been invited. Eleven arrived.

The one who didn’t was never mentioned again.

Mara was one of them—invited on the strength of her recent success, a debut novel that had clawed its way into the public's imagination and refused to leave. She came not to write a second book, she claimed, but to think about it. To feel the world again after so much time lost in one of her own making.

But the first thing she noticed upon arrival was how loud the silence was.

Stillwater was a converted lodge with creaky floors and too many windows. Each writer got their own cabin, but meals were taken communally, at a long wooden table that smelled faintly of varnish and roasted rosemary.

They had group sessions in the mornings: feedback circles, theory discussions, readings. Afternoons were for silent work. No phones. No Wi-Fi. Just words and wind and a persistent sense that stories had already lived in these walls long before them.

Mara didn’t write.

Not at first.

She watched.

Listened.

There was the horror novelist who wore gloves even indoors. The poet who hummed before every meal. The short story writer who refused to sit with her back to any door.

And then there was Jules.

Jules hadn’t published yet, but she had the kind of intensity that made the rest of them lean forward when she spoke. Her eyes burned with curiosity. Her stories were sharp, unsettling, full of clocks that ticked backward and characters who forgot who they were mid-sentence.

One morning, Jules read aloud a scene about a woman trapped in a house where every mirror showed a different version of herself. When it ended, the room went still.

Someone whispered, “That didn’t feel fictional.”

Jules just smiled. “What makes you think it was?”

Mara felt a shiver climb her spine.

They paired up for critique sessions by drawing names from a coffee mug.

Mara drew Jules.

Their meeting was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, in the main lodge’s sunroom.

Jules arrived with her story printed, annotated, already folded where she wanted Mara to begin.

“You can mark it up,” she said, sliding it across. “But I want to know what you felt more than what you thought.”

Mara flipped through the pages. The story was called “Draft Zero.”

“The writer sits in front of the mirror, not to see herself—but to remember. She has forgotten what belonged to her and what belonged to the page.”

Each line hit like déjà vu.

Mara looked up. “This feels like…”

“Like something you’ve read before?” Jules asked.

Mara hesitated. “More like something I almost wrote.”

Jules smiled. “That’s the thing about stories. They choose their moment. And sometimes, they knock on more than one door.”

Mara didn’t sleep that night.

She dreamed of mirrors. Of pages that turned themselves. Of a cabin that changed shape every time you blinked.

By the second week, Mara had begun writing again.

It wasn’t her second novel, not exactly.

Just fragments.

A character named Mina. A house that erased your memories. A recurring line: “There are no drafts, only echoes.”

She shared none of it during sessions.

It didn’t feel like hers yet.

And besides, every time she reread a passage, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Jules had already written it.

They talked more—late nights on the porch, paper cups of tea in their hands.

“Do you ever feel like the stories are... watching us?” Jules asked one night.

Mara laughed, too quickly. “You mean, like, inspiration?”

Jules shook her head. “No. I mean that once we start writing something true, it starts writing us back.”

Mara didn’t have a response.

The next day, Jules was gone.

No one could explain it.

Her cabin was empty.

Her things still there—clothes, toiletries, even a notebook open on the desk. But her pages were missing. Every draft. Every printed story. Her laptop too.

The program director, a soft-spoken woman named Carla, called the police, then called Jules’s emergency contact.

No signs of struggle.

No note.

Just… absence.

The group continued, but the air shifted. Meals were quieter. Sessions tighter. Eyes darted toward empty chairs.

Mara kept writing.

Now obsessively.

The fragments became scenes. The scenes wove into something like a plot.

In the story, Mina arrives at a retreat where no one writes their own work. Each participant finds pages left for them—under their pillows, inside their coat pockets, slipped between the pages of books they never brought. The stories are brilliant. Too brilliant. And no one remembers writing them.

Mara read it back and felt chilled.

She hadn’t outlined it.

Hadn’t even meant to write a story.

But there it was.

When she tried to backtrack—to remember how it started—she found her notebook had only one line scrawled at the top of the first page:

“This is not the first version.”

On the final night of the retreat, they held a closing reading. Each writer was asked to share something they’d written during the stay.

Mara waited until the end.

When she stood, the others watched with a strange intensity.

She began:

“Mina wakes to find a story on her desk, written in her own handwriting. But she does not remember writing it. The ending is familiar. Too familiar. Because she has read it before—in a story shared by someone else, in another version of this place…”

The room was silent.

When she looked up, half of the writers were staring at her like they were waiting for something.

The other half looked afraid.

Afterward, Carla approached her.

“I need to show you something,” she said.

They walked to the back office.

Carla pulled out a dusty folder.

Inside: past retreat rosters. Feedback notes. Photographs.

And a short story, dated four years ago.

It was called “The Quiet Draft.”

Written by someone named Julianne “Jules” Mercer.

Mara skimmed it, heart pounding.

It was her story.

Mina. The retreat. The disappearing stories.

Even the final line.

“There are no drafts, only echoes.”

Mara’s voice cracked. “Is this a joke?”

Carla looked grim. “Jules attended once before. She disappeared that time too.”

Mara sat heavily in the chair.

“I thought I was writing something new,” she whispered.

“You were,” Carla said. “That’s the thing. These stories… they want to be told. If one writer leaves them unfinished…”

“…another finishes it.”

They sat in silence.

Finally, Mara stood.

“Do others know?” she asked.

“Some,” Carla said. “Most forget by the time they leave. The ones who remember… usually come back.”

Mara stepped into the hallway, blinking under the lodge lights.

Outside, the night hummed.

In her cabin, her notebook waited.

Still open.

Still blank.

Just one line added while she was gone:

“Keep going. I remember the ending now.”