The Empty Frame

It was the summer of 2012, and my sister Cora and I were in our mid-teens. Our mother had passed away two years earlier from a sudden heart condition, and our father, a distant but well-meaning man, had remarried and moved us to a creaky old house in the countryside. The house, which we’d inherited from our late grandmother, was a labyrinth of creaking floorboards, drafty hallways, and rooms that seemed to hold their breath. To pass time during the endless summer days, Cora and I fell back on an old family tradition: jigsaw puzzles. Our mother used to put them together with us at the kitchen table, her patient hands guiding pieces into place while she hummed old tunes.

We found an antique puzzle in the attic, unearthed from a dusty chest. The box was fragile, the image on the front faded and unplaceable—a misty forest with a lone figure in the distance. We counted the pieces multiple times, not trusting the tattered box, and to our relief, they all seemed to be there. The dining room table became our workspace, covered in the tiny cardboard shapes. For days, we sorted and clicked pieces together, the scent of old paper and dust filling the air. There was a certain comfort in the ritual, a nostalgic ache for the times when our mother was alive and the world was simpler. As the puzzle neared completion, we noticed something odd: a few pieces in the center were missing—the ones that would form the figure in the forest. The box had been empty, we were sure of it, but we had counted them all. We searched everywhere, under the table, in the cushions, but they were gone. Cora accused me of hiding them as a prank, and I accused her right back. We argued, and the puzzle sat incomplete for days.

One evening, I decided to try to finish it, thinking I could improvise with a pencil or something. As I leaned over the table, I noticed the center of the puzzle was a perfect circle, and the missing pieces would have formed a face. A chill ran down my spine. I felt a pressure behind my eyes, like a migraine, and then I saw them: faint, translucent shapes moving in the room, just at the edge of my vision. I blinked, and they were gone. Cora came in, and I told her what I saw. She laughed nervously and said I was probably just tired from staying up too late. But the next morning, we found the puzzle completed on the table, with the missing pieces in place—except the face was wrong. The figure in the forest was not the same. It had a different face, a woman with hollow eyes. We were both terrified and confused. We didn’t remember touching it. My father, who never paid us much attention, walked by and didn’t seem to notice anything.

That night, I had a nightmare. I was walking through the same misty forest, and I heard a woman’s voice calling my name. I followed the sound to a clearing, where I found a pale figure kneeling over a finished puzzle. She turned to me, and it was the woman from the puzzle. Her eyes were black, and her mouth was stitched shut. I woke up screaming. The next day, we decided to take the puzzle apart and put it back in the box, hoping to be rid of it. But as we packed it away, we found the missing pieces in the bottom of the box, tucked under the flap. They were damp, like they had been wet. We looked at each other, too afraid to speak. We tied the box with string and threw it into the attic, vowing never to open it again.

But the house felt different after that. Shadows seemed to move in the corners of rooms, and I would often catch a glimpse of a woman’s face in the reflective glass of the hallway mirror, only to find it empty when I turned. Cora admitted she saw things too—a shape by the dining room table, and once, she heard a faint humming that she recognized from our mother’s repertoire. We grew paranoid, checking under our beds and locking doors. The final straw was when we found a single jigsaw piece on our father’s bureau, right next to his cufflinks. It was a piece from the puzzle, the one that would have been the eye of the woman. We hadn’t touched it. We told our father, but he shrugged it off, saying it must have been stuck to our clothes. We knew better.

We couldn’t stand it. The anxiety was eating us alive. We decided to confront the house. One afternoon, we climbed to the attic and retrieved the box. The string was still tied, but the box felt heavier. We opened it, and the puzzle pieces spilled out, all of them, but the image on the box had changed. It now showed the same forest, but the figure was unmistakably our mother, with a stitched mouth and hollow eyes. Cora started crying, and I felt a cold presence wrap around me. I heard a whisper, not in my ears, but in my mind: ‘Why did you forget me?’ We slammed the box shut and ran downstairs, our hearts pounding. We told our father everything, and for the first time, he looked scared. He told us that our mother’s death had been quick, but that her final wish was to be remembered. He believed in spirits, he said, and that sometimes unfinished business creates a crack in the world.

We left the house that week, moving to a small apartment in town. We packed only the essentials, leaving the puzzle box behind. To this day, I still feel her presence, a watchful eye, especially when I sit alone in the dark. The empty frame of that jigsaw puzzle hangs in my mind, a perfect circle of missing pieces that can never be filled. Sometimes, I think I see her face in the negative space of doorways, with careful button eyes and a mouth that can only smile in silence. The pieces of that puzzle are still in that house, waiting for another family who might make the mistake of trying to complete the picture.