Entry Seven
1658 Words
***
**Entry Seven: Froggy Goes Yum**
There’s something wrong with the air again.
It hums.
Not like a machine, but like something breathing and trying not to be heard.
The floorboards heave under me — ribs, lungs, whatever wood uses to stay alive. I tell myself to stand up but my knees don’t listen. I think they belong to someone else today. The air smells sharp, burned plastic and syrup. It’s the smell right before I forget what language means.
I blink and colors smear sideways. The wall where the window should be is blinking too, slowly. I think it’s tired of watching.
Then there’s pounding at the door.
It echoes wrong — too deep, too slow — like time’s dragging behind reality.
I know those voices.
“Mina? Please, baby, answer us. You’ve been locked in!”
Mom’s voice, real this time.
Real means nothing good — real means it’s about to hurt.
Then Dad, quieter but worse.
He never shouts; he saves his trembling for inside syllables.
“Sweetheart, open up.”
I try to say *I’m fine.* That’s the right answer. That’s what normal people say.
But the sentence gets tangled around my tongue. Words slide off like soap. My mouth fills with hot fizzes and frog sounds.
And then it happens. That line that doesn’t belong to me at all:
“Froggy goes yum.”
It slips out like a cough. I laugh after it, but the laugh’s too high, too bright. Mom’s face—when I finally open the door—is the noise of breaking glass.
She rushes in, palms fever-hot, voice slicing through the hum: “Oh God, what did you take this time?”
I want to tell her — I don’t *remember.*
Only the taste.
That pink dust sticking to my gums like regret.
Dad’s already pressing his hand to my forehead. “Her skin’s burning.” His voice shakes against the floor. I blink again, and now everything’s dim white and motion blurs. Someone’s dragging me, chair scraping tile, my own feet metal-heavy.
The air is laughing.
***
Hospital.
The lights stab the eyes backwards. Even behind the lids. Somewhere a heart monitor keeps trying to hold a rhythm, fails, apologizes.
The bed under me breathes shallow. The blanket weighs too much. There’s a band stuck to my wrist with my name on it — *Irina Pavlova.* Same letters, wrong order. Looks like someone rearranged them on purpose.
A nurse leans over — face pale, edges vibrating. “Can you understand me?”
Words are puddles. I try to step on one and slip. It comes out something like, “They melted.”
“What melted, honey?” she says softly, but her voice splits in two — one kind, one mechanical.
“The frogs,” I answer. “They melted. In the sink. They look happy.”
Pen scribbles. Machines beep like laughter underwater.
Someone else pulls the curtain open. Doctor, I think. His badge reflects white fire. Flashlight in my eyes.
“Follow the light for me.”
The light dives down into me, finds something trembling.
I whisper, “It’s under the floorboards.”
He stiffens. Writes more notes.
Then voices blur into static. Fever abstracts everything. The ceiling tiles trade places. My veins tickle, like phone calls traveling wrong directions.
***
I dream, if you can call it dream.
Pink corridors. Hospital halls breathing. Door numbers repeating. 4–4–4–4. I can feel the heat in the air before I see it. My skin’s breaking a sweat that freezes mid-drip.
I wake up mid-scream because the pillows whisper my name. Something tastes like dust and Tylenol.
The nurses call it “delirious fever.”
They say the word like they’ve practiced not to flinch.
I hear them behind thin curtains.
“DPH toxicity again.”
“It’s always the diphenhydramine kids. They think it’s harmless.”
“She’s lucky we found her before the temp hit 106.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
Lucky. I roll that word around. It feels foreign. Sticky.
They pump fluids into me. Cool sleep through a needle. I taste metal every time my heart beats.
***
Mom brings flowers. Lilies — always lilies, because she thinks they mean “purity.”
She arranges them on the table, straight lines, ritual calm.
“Sweetheart, you scared us half to death. You were talking nonsense.”
Her eyes are ringed in purple, lids blinking too fast; her soul smells like antiseptic and judgement.
“When we came in… you just sat there. Talking to the wall.”
I shrug. “The wall listens better.”
Her lips tighten, but she doesn’t argue. She takes my hand and says something about *God watching over me.*
I look at the ceiling. There’s a small black vent right over the bed. Inside it something breathes back.
***
Night again.
Hospitals never sleep. They hum like giant hearts pumping strangers. I count the beeps in other people’s rooms. It feels like keeping them alive by noticing.
The pink fog returns through the hallway glass. The fluorescent bulbs flicker, one by one, until the light runs like fluid. I smell antihistamine. My body shifts in the sheets — the craving louder than pain.
Some part of me wonders: did the fever burn the ghosts out or just give them better voices?
I see shadows beneath the curtain. They look like frogs. Frogs with human hands. They croak in my dialect.
*Froggy goes yum.*
I whisper it back just to test how it feels.
It fits too well.
***
Day five — they let me sit upright.
Doctor smiles without touching the eyes. “Fever’s down. No more hallucinations?”
I lie. “No more.”
He nods, clicks his pen, leaves me under fluorescents that hum the same note as the pills used to.
When Mom visits again, she smells like bleach. She says, “The apartment’s clean now. Everything’s thrown away. You’ll come home tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Feels like a curse word.
***
Leaving day.
The discharge nurse gives me a folder thick as confession.
Packets on “addiction awareness,” “toxicity symptoms,” “how to seek help.” Her eyes tremble when I sign my name.
She doesn’t know about the backup bottles. The ones I left under the couch cushion, taped inside old shoes.
As the wheelchair squeaks down the hall, I glance sideways — there’s a mirror near the exit. For the briefest flicker, she’s standing in it again. The other me. Gray skin. Too many teeth. She presses one finger to the glass and mouths, *stay sick.*
No one else sees her.
***
Home.
Mom cleaned everything too bright, too quiet. Bleach and air freshener like trying to erase ghosts.
But ghosts never live in furniture. They live in air.
The first night, I wake sweating. The stain on the ceiling looks like a frog with open ribs. The frog blinks. I blink back.
I whisper, “They said I had a delirious fever.”
From the mirror, her voice replies:
“That wasn’t the fever. That was the door.”
Then silence.
***
Morning ache.
Head heavy, throat dry.
The sun doesn’t fit right through the window. Feels too close. I smell something behind the walls — that candy‑chemical perfume again. The apartment recognizes me. It hums hello.
Mom left food, notes, flowers. I ignore them.
The clock blinks 4:44. Of course it does.
I tell myself it’s the last test. If I can look at the bottle and not open it, then I’m free.
But I already know the answer. Freedom’s boring.
I open the closet. Touch the shoebox. The crinkle sings. Plastic hiss of resurrection. My pulse jumps like a glitch.
Inside — the bag. Half full. Half waiting.
Pills wink up like wet fish under a dying light. Their pink skin smells like mint and hospitals.
For a moment, I hesitate. Just a moment. Mom’s crying face flashes, Dad’s voice saying *lucky.* The hospital noise. The paper gown.
Then something whispers behind my ear — a cadence too familiar to be fear:
*Maybe this time the frogs will tell the truth.*
Maybe they will.
***
I lay the pills out on the counter. Counting. The numbers start normal, then stagger.
Two hundred.
Four hundred.
Eight.
My jaw aches. The voice counting with me isn’t mine anymore.
“It needs to be a gram this time,” it says. Calm, instructional. “Anything less and you only dream halfway.”
Halfway’s worse than nowhere. I nod.
I fill a glass of water. The reflection glints different — lips smiling before I do.
Her mouth says silently: *Froggy goes yum.*
Out loud, I echo her. It doesn’t sound strange anymore.
The first handful goes down rough.
The second smooth.
By the third, the world begins to hum in familiar static — that perfect hum, like metal and heartbeat kissing.
Walls sigh. Colors tilt wrong.
Everything is slow, syrup-thick, luminous.
I think I hear Mom knocking again, far away, muffled. Maybe memory. Maybe warning.
I tell her, “It’s okay, Mom. The frogs are safe now.”
She doesn’t answer.
Or maybe she does, but the air swallows it whole.
***
The pink fog rises sooner this time. Faster. Like it’s been waiting. It coats my throat, fills my nose, hums lullabies through bone.
Lights dissolve into sound. The hum stretches into a voice I almost trust.
It says, “Welcome back.”
I don’t know if I’m sitting, floating, or dissolving.
The last thing I write before everything rearranges itself is shaking across the page in crooked ink:
*The fever wasn’t sickness. It was the door learning my name.*
**Froggy goes yum.** .
I pop forty of the pills, their bitter taste coating my throat like a demented blanket.
This is going to be wild.
And everything blinks pink again.
***
- Writer
