There's nothing.
Not darkness. Not silence. Just a hollow, impossible space—wires ripped out of the world, the husk left behind. Not cold. Not warm. Not anything. I can't feel my limbs. Can't tell if I'm breathing. Time isn't ticking forward. It's not even ticking sideways. It's just—gone.
I don't think I'm asleep. Sleep has dreams. Movement. A slow fade. This is sudden. Blank. Unplugged.
Like someone flipped the lights in my head and hit pause—not just on me, but on everything.
Then—buzzing.
Thin. Electric. Creeping in through the base of my skull. A vibration, not a sound—a whisper with no words. It travels down my spine and into my chest, settling behind my ribcage as if it belongs there. It coils in my lungs. Presses behind my eyes. Not painful—just present. Heavy. Settling onto me like weight I can't shake off.
Pure, shapeless static.
A blizzard of fuzz between TV channels—when the antenna doesn't quite catch the signal. It hums behind my eyes. For a second, I swear I see the bars—those gray lines that scroll when a VCR chews a tape too rough.
The sound of forgotten noise. The texture of nothing trying to be something.
I'm not returning to my body. I'm being loaded into something else.
A memory. A glitch. A loop.
The world doesn't slam back into place. It clicks. Wobbles. Hesitates. A tape being pushed into a slot and not catching right away, then finally snapping forward with a dull, reluctant clunk.
And then—
The smell hits.
Not gently. Not gradually. It floods in, soaking everything in one long, deep inhale. I know this place by scent before I see it. I remember it with my nose, before anything else catches up.
Pencil shavings. Sharp, dry, and papery. The tang of white glue that dried in a puddle and turned rubbery overnight. The ghost of erasers ground to stubs, the scent of plastic scorched just slightly from friction. And markers—dead ones. That stale, chemical ink smell—long dead, but kids still uncap it, hoping it'll magically come back to life.
Sweat. So much sweat. It lives in the fibers of old winter coats slung over the backs of chairs. In the collars of sweaters passed down through too many siblings. It's baked into the carpet, into the bulletin boards, into the fabric of the American flag pinned to the corner of the chalkboard.
The floor wax tries to fight it, but never wins. There's an artificial lemon scent trying its best to be clean. Underneath, always: chalk dust. Old plastic. The faint sweetness of Lysol sprayed too thick in a panic before parents showed up for conferences.
And beneath that, something worse. Something sour. Milk. Days old. Half a carton left to rot in the trash bin under the coat rack. The kind of smell that sticks to the air and the back of your throat at the same time.
That smell unlocks something.
My head jerks up. My face is glued to my sleeve. My skin peels from the fabric with a tacky rip—velcro. My arm is numb. Heavy. My neck feels like it's been frozen in place. When I shift, everything aches. My elbow bumps the desk—too sharp of pain for my funny bone to respond. My fingers don't work right at first. I flex them slowly, but they feel like they belong to someone else.
I blink. Once. Twice. The world around me is both too bright and not bright enough.
Overhead, the tube lights buzz to life—not in a flicker, but a long, whiny hum, as if someone dragging light across the ceiling inch by inch. The glow is thin and yellow. Sickly. It doesn't so much illuminate as it stains.
Shapes emerge. Corners sharpen. The edges of things snapping into shape, a pop-up book opened too fast, pages misaligned.
This isn't the city. This isn't night. This isn't blood or concrete or sirens or shouting.
This is a classroom. Sixth period. Middle of bumfuck nowhere, Wisconsin.
And I'm twelve. Again.
The realization doesn't land like thunder. It drips. Quietly. One drop. Then another, a gutter slowly overflowing with rain.
I'm not just seeing it—I'm dissolving into it. Almost as if I'm made of smoke. Like the room's breathing me in piece by piece. The classroom pulls me in by the seams, and suddenly I'm not sitting in a chair—I'm part of it. The desk under my arm. The air. The weight. My skin remembers before I do. The way this place used to make me small even when I didn't understand why.
The linoleum under my feet is cracked, chipped, and stained. A checkerboard of decay. Some of the squares are curling at the corners, crisp as dried leaves. There's a smell in the floor itself, a permanent mustiness from too many mop buckets never properly rinsed.
The walls are a green-gray that can't be named. Somewhere between bile and concrete. The kind of color they only use in cafeterias and detention halls. It's chipped around the corners. Scuffed from backpacks. Scratched by the sharp edges of desks dragged too carelessly.
There's a radiator in the back that clicks every few seconds. It sounds like it's trying to form words. A window leaks cold even though it's shut tight. The glass is fogged in the corners. I can't see outside, but I know it's gray. Overcast. Always is.
The desks are too close together. Too fucking cramped. Plastic seats fused to metal legs that whine when anyone shifts their weight. Mine squeaks just from me breathing. There's dried gum stuck underneath. A scab on the underside of the world.
Carved into the top: someone's initials. An old band name. A jagged spiral. My desk has a burn mark in the corner where someone once tried to melt a pen into the surface. The melted edge feels smooth beneath my palm.
At the front of the room, the overhead projector hums, waiting to die. The plastic casing is yellowed with age. Its glass eye projects a warped square of light across the chalkboard, crooked and dim. The transparency it casts is smudged against old parchment. Handwritten notes from days ago: trench warfare, barbed wire, shell shock. Someone's drawn a stick figure with Xs for eyes and labeled it "Fritz."
Behind the light beam, the chalkboard is layered with past lessons—chalk dust never fully wiped away. Old notes cling stubbornly to the surface, faint chalk lines and erased dates blending into the dust like the board never got clean enough. A map of Europe droops to one side. The Soviet Union spreads in red, aggressive and oversized. Tape curls at the corners. East Germany is mostly obscured by someone's attempt to scratch it out with a thumbtack.
The walls are cluttered with posters—sun-faded, curling at the corners, held up by brittle masking tape that gave up doing its job a long time ago. There's a yellowing chart of the food pyramid beside the door, still insisting on five servings of bread a day. A laminated print of President Reagan—newly elected and still more television personality than president—is crookedly taped above the coat hooks, although one corner has peeled and folded over itself so all you really see is his hairline. Near it, there's a poster with a smiling cartoon egg frying in a pan that reads "This is your brain on drugs," which everyone uses as an excuse to crack jokes about breakfast in the mornings.
Closer to the windows, someone drew a mustache on the turtle in the "Duck and Cover" poster. No one got caught, which means it was probably Jordan, who always sits in the back and smells of gasoline. Next to it, a rules sheet typed on an actual typewriter reminds us to "Respect Authority Figures" and "Keep Our Voices at Indoor Level." It's signed in red pen by someone named "Mr. Elkins," printed in red pen like he might stroll in any second—except no one's seen him in years, and rumor has it he retired without telling anyone. Some kids say he just vanished mid-semester. Others say he still has a drawer in the teacher's lounge full of pudding cups. There's a newspaper clipping about the Mount St. Helens eruption tacked up above the film reel diagram, the black-and-white photo nearly faded to gray. A plume of smoke rises, clenched and defiant out of the side of the mountain, the headline barely legible anymore. No one talks about it, but some of us remember watching the news about it last spring, sitting criss-cross applesauce on this same tile floor, pretending we weren't scared.
There are campaign stickers on the side of the bookcase, curling at the edges and fading into the wood—ghosts of old arguments no one finished. Carter/Mondale 1980 is barely legible—just a smudge of dull blue and red. A Reagan sticker, newer and shinier, sits taped up beside it with scotch tape that's started to yellow. Somebody scratched a crooked peace sign under Carter's name, then tried to erase it, but the pencil scar is still there. None of it really matters—not to us. Not to kids stuck in this dumbass room, waiting for the bell. It's some kind of freedom chime. The election's over. The grown-ups picked a new president, and we all went back to dodgeball and spelling tests like it never happened.
Everywhere I look, there's history frozen not just in lesson plans, but in the way everything's been left to sag and fade.
Other students are doing what they always do when the teacher's not watching—passing folded notes in secret hand-offs, pretending to yawn while sliding gum into their mouths, scrawling band names like The Clash and The Police into the spines of their notebooks. A boy in the second row is flipping his pencil between his fingers. He thinks he's a drummer sometimes, but this time I'm surprised he is so still and patient. A girl across from me is braiding and unbraiding a long string of yarn, tying it to her Trapper Keeper.
And yet all of it feels muted, as if I'm watching through a pane of thick glass. Like the version of me in this memory hasn't fully stepped into the scene yet. It's hovering just beyond the surface, weightless and quiet, studying everything through my eyes but not quite blinking. Just out there, on the edge of the air, watching it all settle, slow and grainy, like a photograph in the darkroom. And I can feel her—the younger me—getting ready to step forward. To slip into the moment, a coat I once wore and forgot fit this well. And when she does, I won't be able to stop it. I won't even want to. Because the longer I sit here, the more I remember how it felt to be her. Small. Cornered. Waiting for something to happen and not knowing whether to flinch or run.
My hands are on the desk. I don't remember putting them there. I don't remember sitting up. But I'm here, and my fingers are moving.
My trapper keeper is open. Its velcro flap lies limp. Inside, loose pages stick out like feathers. Notes, assignments, doodles—some mine, some probably not. My notebook is open. A pen is in my hand.
And it's moving.
The pen draws shapes I don't remember choosing. Circles. Jagged lines. Flames. Eyes. Symbols. The ink is dark. Heavy. Pressed too hard into the paper. My knuckles are stiff and pale.
And then—
Something shifts.
The air pulls taut, like the classroom took a deep breath and forgot how to exhale. Pressure builds in my ears. The hum of the projector distorts. Stretches. Sounds wrong. The lights overhead flicker once—then twice—then hold.
And then everything—
Stops.
It doesn't feel like a moment. It feels like a tear in the film—like the projectionist forgot to load the next reel and everything just... hangs. The silence doesn't fall. It crashes. Not the awkward hush of someone walking in, or the stillness of a teacher's glare—but something colder. Permanent.The kind of silence that doesn't just wait, it settles. Anchors. It makes my ears ring, like I've been dropped into the deep end of a pool with no way up.
A part of me still thinks this is in my head. That I zoned out—really spaced—the way I sometimes did during Sunday mass or in the backseat on long drives when Dad wouldn't stop listening to polka on AM radio. One second you're there, the next you're staring at the seam between two bricks wondering if they're friends or enemies.
But this isn't that. This is deeper, I slipped sideways into a cracked frame of film. Like something peeled reality open—not ripped, but sliced clean—and never stitched it back together. There's no bleed-through, no fade. Just the wrongness, hanging heavy in the air. A crack in the world that I slipped through without meaning to.
The light freezes. The hum goes dead mid-note. The projector clicks once, almost if it's about to spool something forward—and then chokes. Nothing moves. No whispers. No paper rustling. No chairs scraping. No coughing. No sighs.
Mrs. Tharven is mid-stride, her mouth open around some word—probably casualties or barbed wire—but the sound never comes. Her hand is raised, piece of chalk in her grip, caught mid-gesture. Even the powder dust hovering in the air seems locked in place, like it's been trapped in amber. If I got close enough, I feel I could breathe it in and cough it back out like a ghost.
Tommy has his arm in the air, bent at the elbow with his finger wagging like he's about to answer another question he wasn't asked. His eyes are turned toward the board, but his face is locked in some smug expression like he knows something no one else does. IHe's not just frozen. He's paused—mid-thought, mid-breath, mid-smirk. Like someone hit stop on a tape.
Everyone is.
Not just the kids. The whole room. The fan in the back corner, the flickering tube light above me, the second hand on the wall clock—it's all stuck, the reel stopped spinning. Like the tape ran off the spool and there's nothing left but empty air.
Me?
I'm breathing.
I blink. The motion feels heavy, exaggerated. Imagine blinking underwater with chlorine or salt burning your corneas.
The hum in my head sharpens. A high, glassy tone. It's not inside the room. It's inside me. Behind my eyes, in my bones. Familiar and wrong at the same time.
The hum sharpens—high, glassy.
Not in the room. In me. Behind my eyes, inside my bones.
Familiar. Wrong.
My pen's still moving.
I don't feel it. But the ink curls across the page like it knows how this ends.
Like I'm just catching up.
I let go.
The pen rolls to a stop. The quiet deepens. Somehow, impossibly, the stillness gets even thicker.
The air is too still. Too clean. Whatever held the room together a moment ago decided to let go. Like gravity itself is holding its breath.
I shift in my seat. Push the desk away from me with a screech that cuts through the silence.
No one flinches.
No one turns.
My chair legs scrape the linoleum as I stand. I expect to hear Mrs. Tharven shout. Expect someone to giggle. To snap out of it. To look. Anything.
But they don't.
I step into the aisle.
I wave a hand slowly toward the nearest desk. Nothing. No reaction. I could be a ghost, and they wouldn't blink. My fingers feel numb in the open air.
And I'm alone in a room full of people.
For a second, I think maybe I've fallen asleep—I'm dreaming with my eyes open. The quiet is so thick it hums. Everything around me is still, too still. Like the world forgot how to move. My breath echoes inside my head, loud and too slow, and every step I take feels sticky.
I pass by their desks. My classmates look like wax figures, museum mannequins posed in the middle of ordinary moments. Keisha's mid-turn, her braid caught in the air behind her. Stanley's head is bent, pencil hovering an inch from his math book, stuck on a problem like the numbers might float off the page. He's got thick glasses held together with a dab of glue and a wristwatch he checks obsessively, like he's waiting for a NASA launch instead of the bell. Tommy's hand is still raised, finger twitching slightly—or maybe that's just my imagination. I half expect him to blink and ruin the whole thing.
I glance toward the window. Even the trees outside have stopped swaying. No birds. No clouds drifting. Just a flat photograph of sky, pinned outside the window like scenery in a play. The light's all wrong. It's yellow-gray and dim, like the sun is giving up.
There's dust in the projector's light beam, suspended like glitter in a snow globe. I watch it hang there, waiting to fall. It doesn't. I exhale softly, trying to make it move. Nothing. Just glued in place and stationary.
I reach for Keisha's braid, stopping just short—feeling the ghost of warmth where she last moved. It doesn't move. Her hair stays suspended, gravity forgotten. I pull my hand back.
I try the radiator. Still warm. Still humming faintly under the metal. The heat feels real—but distant. It's leaking from somewhere else. I run my hand along the windowsill. It's gritty with chalk dust and pitted with years of names etched into the paint.
No breath. No blinks. Not even a twitch.
And I wonder—maybe this is what it's like to be dead. To be awake and alone in a room where the world keeps its back turned. Maybe I broke something. Maybe I left and forgot how to come back. Maybe this is what happens when you don't belong anywhere.
My eyes drift to the chalkboard. A phrase is half-written, slanted and sharp, the chalk still pinched in Mrs. Tharven's frozen hand. I stare at the word until the letters blur. I try to read it—something about trench warfare—but it won't stick. The letters dance and fade, then reform.
I try to swallow. My throat's dry, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as if all the gum from under the desks got repositioned. I clench my fists at my sides and flex my toes inside my shoes, just to feel something grounded, something real. I grip the edge of a desk. My nails dig into the plastic.
Then the buzz returns—low, warning. It murmurs at the base of my skull, then down my spine like someone running cold fingers over my vertebrae. I blink hard. My heart thuds once, twice—too loud, too close.
My breath stutters. The lights don't flicker, but the world wants to. My heartbeat is so loud I swear it's vibrating the chair legs. My vision tunnels for a split second, and I wonder if I'm about to pass out—or explode.
And that's when I hear it.
"Ignis Esparza."
The name hits like a slap—sharp, sudden, slicing the stillness wide open. It doesn't echo. It detonates. The sound tears a seam in the silence, and everything rushes in behind it. My body flinches before my brain catches up.
I blink again. The lights overhead flicker. A breath catches. The room is moving slowly, like molasses left out in the sun. Keisha turns. Stanley blinks. Tommy lowers his hand.
The buzz of the overhead light crashes back—too bright, too loud. Pages flutter. A cough. A sneaker squeaks against linoleum. All of it at once.
The world exhales. But I forgot how to breathe.
"Would you care to rejoin us?"
Mrs. Tharven stares straight at me, glasses low on her nose, her mouth set in a frown like I just personally insulted history itself.
My knees buckle. I don't remember standing. Maybe I never did.
I jolt in my seat. My chair creaks beneath me. My notebook is still open on my desk.
I'm back.
And I have no idea how long I was gone.
The classroom is back, but it doesn't feel right.
The noise returns—scraping pencils, dying electricity, restless kids shifting in their chairs—but it all sounds like it's coming from underwater. Muffled. Off-key. Like the soundtrack slipped off the reel.
My chest is tight. I can't tell if I'm still shaking or if the tremble has moved somewhere deeper—into my spine, into the part of me that never stops moving even when everything else does. My fingers are clenched into the underside of my desk like I'm trying to keep myself tethered to this moment, this reality. The edge of the desk bites into my palm.
"Eyes on the board, Miss Esparza," she says. Her voice is sharp, but it floats past me slowly. Like it took the longest route through the air to get here.
I raise my head. My eyes land on the chalkboard. The same list of World War I battles. The same stick figure drawing labeled Fritz. Everything's where it was. But I can't tell if it ever moved at all.
Keisha is writing in her notebook, lips moving silently.
Stanley taps his watch again, squinting through cracked glasses like the room hasn't just rewound itself.
Tommy bites the cap off his pen like he wasn't frozen for however long that was.
None of them noticed.
Or if they did, they're all pretending real hard.
I look down at my notebook.
The page is full.
Not notes. Not answers.
Just spirals. Circles. That flame again. Symbols I don't remember drawing.
I flip to the next page. More of them. Some drawn lightly. Some so deep the ink bled through.
They look... familiar. Not from school. From dreams.
Or from the backs of my eyelids.
The pen is still in my hand.
I drop it.
The sound it makes when it hits the floor is too loud.
A few heads turn. Someone snickers.
Mrs. Tharven clears her throat, trying not to outright sigh. "Would you like to visit the nurse, or can we focus now?"
I don't answer. I can't.
My mouth feels dusty—like the janitor locked it up for the spiders and never came back.
I nod. Just to get her to look away.
She does. The moment passes.
But something inside me is still paused.
Still watching.
Still waiting.
The hallway outside the classroom is colder than I remember.
Something inside me says don't.
Not in words—just that squeeze in the gut, like turning down a road you know ends badly.
Not winter coat cold.
Church basement cold. Unfinished attic cold.
Wrong kind of cold. A room that hasn't been used in years but still remembers what it used to be. It clings to your sleeves. Settles in your ears. That kind of cold that doesn't wake you up—it sedates you.
The door clicks shut behind me. A thin echo. The noise inside fades fast, replaced by the low hum of the building itself—rumbling overhead, an air vent rattling like a wheeze. Far-off footsteps. A locker door slamming shut. Maybe. Or maybe I imagined it.
My shoes squeak too loud on the linoleum as I walk. Each step echoes down the corridor like I'm the only person left in the school. Maybe I am.
They won't even notice you're gone.
The thought isn't mine.
Or maybe it is.
Maybe it's always been there—half a step behind me, waiting for the air to thin.
The echo doubles back, sharp and tinny like it's trying to chase me down the hall. Rows of lockers line the walls, scuffed and dented, paint chipped where stickers used to be. Names scratched in with keys. Gum hardened like fossils under the combination dials. One locker is hanging open, a pair of busted headphones tangled on the hook inside like someone left in a hurry and never came back. Someone carved "Suck it Nixon" into the corner of the one across from the library, but it's been half-scratched out by time or keys or maybe someone who didn't get the joke.
There's a draft leaking in from somewhere. It stirs a piece of notebook paper stuck to the radiator grate—just enough to flutter. The paper moves. But nothing else does.
The smell in the hallway is different from the classroom—less chalk, more floor wax and hot metal from the radiator covers. There's something faint underneath it all—old mop water, cafeteria grease, and teenage sweat. Somewhere down the hall, a gym whistle blows. A door slams. A voice yells. But it all feels like background noise to someone else's life. Like the soundtrack is playing for a different scene, in a different movie.
I hold my hall pass in both hands, not really reading it, just keeping it there like proof that I'm allowed to be here. That this is still part of the day. If someone caught me wandering, I could show this slip and be escorted back to safety.
I pass the trophy case. Dusty plaques. A team photo from before I was born.
Every face stares out blankly—trapped behind cracked glass like they know they've been forgotten. For a second, I wonder if they're stuck like I was. If they knew they were fading when the photo was taken. Some of the trophies are leaning, the gold paint flaking off their little figurine arms. One has lost its plaque altogether. Just a boy-shaped ghost standing on a crooked base.
I stop. For a second. Just long enough.
A drinking fountain hums against the wall. The kind you have to bend too far to use, and even then, the water only dribbles—thin, metallic. I reach out, touch the push button. Cold metal.
But the hum beneath it doesn't match the rhythm of anything else around me. Like it's tuned to a different frequency.
I don't drink.
You really think that little slip of paper makes you real?
The voice wraps around my ears like breath pressed to skin.
Keep walking, little spark. Let's see where this takes you.
I keep moving.
The light above me buzzes louder for a second. Then quieter. Then loud again. I glance up. The tube flickers. Nothing else reacts.
Every step away from the classroom peels something off. The noise. The light. The desk. The lemon cleaner clinging to the air.
Even my own name, written in Mrs. Tharven's tight cursive on the slip, looks fake. Like it belongs to someone else. Like I'm holding a character from someone else's story.
Names don't save you, she whispers. They just give them something to carve into the stone..
I think I'm walking toward the nurse's office. I know that's what I'm supposed to be doing. But my feet slow when I pass the stairwell.
I look down the dim staircase—just a few steps below, the light cuts off like a bad edit. Shadows pool there. It smells like wet coats and forgotten shoes. I grip the railing just once. It's sticky. I let go fast.
The hallway stretches out in both directions—familiar, but wrong. Every closed door looks the same. Every corner hums with the kind of stillness that makes your teeth itch. There's a bulletin board to my right, plastered with yellowing announcements for clubs that probably don't meet anymore. Someone scribbled over the chess team flyer with the word "nerds" in blue ink. It's been circled three times.
I keep walking. Past the office. Past the turn I should've taken.
I pass the band room. A faint echo of a scale, played wrong, then again. A pause. Then silence. The door is shut.
My feet keep going without me.
My fingers trail the tiled wall, tracing the grout lines like maybe I'll feel a break—a crack—something that proves the world is still stitched together.
I think maybe if I keep going, I'll reach the end of it. Some part of me whispers that I've done this before, walked these halls when no one else could see me. Or wouldn't. The place where everything stops pretending to be normal. The place where the hallway ends and whatever's underneath it all begins.
I don't make it to the nurse's office.
I don't make it anywhere.
Because something inside me stutters—like an engine skipping a beat.
And then everything goes quiet again.
Not the building.
Me.
I stop walking.
My hand drops from the wall.
The hall pass flutters to the floor like a torn-off wing.
And I wait—for the voice I know is coming.
Because it always does.
It's not loud. It never is. It's not some evil scream echoing down the halls. Not a demon on my shoulder, not some shadow crawling up my spine. It's me. It's always me.
A quieter, sharper version. The one who always knows where to press.
You think this is over?
You think you're walking away from it?
I close my eyes. Inhale. The smell of floor wax and radiator dust curls into my lungs.
You're not getting out that easy, little spark.
The hallway doesn't move. But I feel the weight of it—of her—settling in.
Fog creeps under the door.
A memory returns—uninvited, insistent.
My eyes snap open.
I don't know what's worse: the silence, or the fact that I don't want to break it.
The silence isn't just silence anymore.
It's weight.
It presses against my chest. Against the walls. Against whatever's barely holding this moment together.The hallway fades—as though it was never real to begin with, just a memory projected onto peeling paint. I've overstayed my welcome. The reel ran out, and no one bothered to load the next one.
The lockers blur. The walls melt at the edges.
Even the smell of the building, that sour-wax-and-metal tang, thins like steam. My breath leaves condensation on air that shouldn't be this cold.
You always do this, the voice says. You dig up ghosts and wonder why they bite.
I want to scream back at her—at myself—but the noise gets stuck halfway up my throat. It's not that I'm afraid. It's that there's no room left for sound in here.
My feet drift, unhooked from gravity.
I'm here, but barely—static fuzz before the tape cuts out.
I try to speak. To answer her. But my mouth won't open. My jaw is locked, my throat dry, like the inside of me has been stuffed with dust and silence.
The buzz from the overhead lights is gone. All I can hear is my own breath and that voice—hers, mine—echoing from the inside.
You think you're remembering. But you're not.
You're slipping.
I want to say I'm not.
I want to say I'm fine.
But I'm not.
I'm drifting. Splitting at the seams.
I'm not just slipping. I'm being dragged. And whatever's pulling me doesn't care if I come back wrong.
Something cracks. Not outside. Not around me. In me.
A flicker of heat pulses at the base of my skull, sparking tiny and bright before it spreads. Down my spine. Out through my fingertips. The air around me bends. Warps. I reach out for the wall, but it's not there. My hand meets nothing. Just cold.
Everything feels like it's been stretched too thin. The hallway. Me. The moment. Like plastic wrap pulled too far, seconds from tearing.
The hallway doesn't collapse.
It peels—like wallpaper ripped too fast.
Like skin from a burn. Like the world never meant to hold me here this long. Every surface, every sound, every smell unsticks itself from reality and drifts out of focus.
There's pressure in my ears, like a change in altitude. My stomach drops. The kind of drop that happens in dreams—when you're falling, but not really.
For a moment, there's nothing.
Not even her.
No voice. No name. No hallway. Just a breath held between two lives. A half-beat of space. A flicker between frames.
Then the panic creeps in.
Where was I going? What was I supposed to be doing?
The edges of the memory curl inward. I try to hold onto it—something, anything—but my fingers can't catch. It's like trying to catch fog in your hands.
You never get to choose where it starts next, she murmurs.
See what you've buried this time.
I don't know where I'll land.
Let's see if it buries you back.
I don't think it's up to me.
Somewhere, a voice I haven't heard in years is calling my name, but it's too loud to correct. The kind that comes from behind a closed door you haven't opened in a long time. Softer this time. Different. Like dandelion fuzz and milk cartons. Like the crackle of plastic chairs and crayon boxes. Recess whistles. Glue sticks. The silence right before someone cries in front of the whole class.
And I fall back into the darkness. Not a drift. Not a float. A pull—fast and final. Like a film reel yanked from the projector, caught in the gears, burning at the edges.
Not a dream.
Something unseen is already breathing down my neck—
Close. Steady.
Impossible to ignore.
And I remembered what I wasn't supposed to.