Fiction · Confession

The Gate

A short parable about a quiet boy, a wall, and a letter that asked for nothing.

By Sumair Ahmed Mahar · Readers' · October 2026

There was a senorita,four feet nine, who lived in a village behind a wall. The wall had one gate, made for people taller than she was. The villagers thought it a joke, and she thought it weather. Her hair was black and fell without instruction, and when she laughed, her cheeks glowed like a lamp being turned up slowly.

Rayyan lived outside the wall. He was a quiet boy, so quiet that his words had grown heavy from storage. He had never seen the village, only heard it described: kind to its own, exact with strangers.

Then, through a small crack in the stones, he began to talk, the way he had never talked to anyone. She slid her whole map through to him, with the broken roads marked in red. Here the floor is weak. Here a house once burned. Here I flinch. She hid nothing, not even the places where she believed she was hard to love. Rayyan read every mark and never looked away.

One night he wrote her a letter and pushed it through the crack.

I don't know how it happened, but I began talking to you the way I talk to no one. Words that sat in me like stones turned to water around you.

Honestly, I could have lived on without ever telling you this. But the heart stays heavy, like a lamp too full of oil. So I am writing it down, once, so it can finally rest.

I respect you deeply. I have never looked at anyone with wrong intentions, not once. But you are the one whose eyes I fell into, as a man falls into a well and forgets he was ever thirsty. I love your words. You understand me.

You are my crush, my first, and maybe my last. A first light is never forgotten, even if it never becomes a morning.

I only wish you find a good companion, and that this cruel world does not devour you.

I will not knock on your gate. I will not push. When you are ready, you will open it. And if the time never comes, I will still be glad that you were once my light.

She read it, and her answer came slowly. I don't know, she wrote. There are things I cannot change. Your name is not on the gate's list. But I will tell you when I can.

Rayyan smiled, because “I don't know” was not “no.”

He sat down beside the wall and kept talking about small things: music, books, the rain. Behind the stones, a lamp kept burning, and he never asked it to burn brighter.

This is a work of fiction. Characters and places are symbolic.

Sumair Ahmed Mahar is a student, writer and self-publisher from Sindh, and the editor of Readers'. His writing focuses on Pakistani society and human rights.

This story is the exclusive intellectual property of Sumair Ahmed Mahar, originally published on Maud Jaam Articles (maudjaam.blogspot.com). © 2026 Sumair Ahmed Mahar. All rights reserved.