Entry Nine
872 Words
***
**Entry Nine: The Furnace Below the Skin**
There’s a sound that doesn’t belong to Earth. It hums under hearing — a deep dragging, like someone pulling iron chains across the floor of an ocean. That’s the sound that wakes me.
My mouth tastes like ash. Not metaphor ash — the real, too‑fine grit of something burned clean. I think I’m in bed. Then I remember: I don’t have a bed anymore.
Everything’s red. Not red like color — red like *temperature.* The kind of red that glows behind eyelids during a fever. The air hurts to breathe. Every inhale grates like swallowing glass dust.
When I move, the ground moves too, a muscle twitch underneath me. The whole place feels alive in thick, involuntary pulses.
I whisper, “Where am I?”
A voice answers from nowhere, quiet and amused. “You made it.”
“Made it where?”
“The consequence place.”
The voice laughs — low, vibrating through my ribs. I try to stand, and the ground flexes beneath my feet, slick as skin. Ahead is a corridor, long and veined with pink light. The walls exhale steam in steady rhythm, like breathing lungs.
I start walking because there’s nothing else to do. The air hums with insect‑small whispers. They use my name like punctuation: *Irina… Irina… Irina.*
My reflection clings to every wall, stretched and distorted. Sometimes it moves before I do.
At the corridor’s end — a chamber. Huge, round, breathing red heat. And in it, my parents.
***
At first, I think they’re standing. Then I realize they’re *part* of the room — half risen from stone. Faces pressed into glowing walls. Arms stretched outward, swallowed up to the elbows.
Mom’s eyes open. Light flickers behind them.
Dad’s turn next. I hear stone cracking softly as his jaw tries to shape words.
“Irina,” Mom says, voice trembling. “You left the door open, baby.”
Dad’s tone lower, almost kind. “You let it in.”
I shake my head. “No— I didn’t— I locked everything—”
Their gazes flick between pity and accusation.
Then together, perfectly in sync, they whisper:
**“It’s all your fault, Irina.”**
The words echo across the chamber, overlap, repeat until they stop belonging to either of them. The walls join in. The air repeats. Sound folds into itself until even breathing becomes apology.
I fall to my knees. “I didn’t mean—” But the sentence can’t find an ending.
Mom’s face softens for a moment. “You were our heartbeat,” she says.
Dad adds, “Now you’re our echo.”
Behind them, the stone stirs — a shadow too big, too hot to look at directly. Limbs without edges, a body made entirely of light in pain. When it exhales, the room tilts.
“You always wanted a world that talked back,” it says from everywhere.
“Now every wall has your voice.”
The air folds inward around me. The ground trembles as though rooting for collapse.
***
I crawl toward them. Reach out. The stone under my palm burns, first cold, then scalding.
Mom whispers, “You weren’t supposed to follow the noise.”
Dad says, “You wanted to see. So see.”
I look up. The walls slide apart like eyelids, revealing layers below — red‑lit shapes twisted together, whispering the same line over and over:
*It’s all your fault, Irina.*
Each voice matches mine in pitch.
The chamber vibrates. Heat builds until everything blurs. My parents’ faces melt into outlines, still speaking, skin turning transparent with light.
When I scream, it sounds too calm — like reading from a script I wrote in my sleep.
Then silence. Total, dry silence.
The world stops flickering. The air cools. I’m suddenly weightless, falling backward through darkness that hums with leftover sound.
***
When I blink, white replaces red.
A beeping joins my heartbeat — high, insistent. My wrists ache. IV lines hug them in bruised crescents.
Hospital again.
A nurse’s voice near my head: “One gram,” she mutters. “How is she alive?”
Another voice: “Luck. Or cruelty.”
Their conversation fades behind machinery beeps that keep time for me. My eyes won’t focus.
I think I hear Mom crying. But it might just be oxygen hissing.
I try to speak. To explain what I saw, what they were. All that comes out is static breath followed by three broken words:
**“Froggy… goes… yum.”**
Someone gasps. Someone else writes something down.
***
Later, when the lights dim and the nurses disappear, the ceiling hums.
Through the vents, I hear my parents again — quieter now, no accusation this time. Just humming, almost lullaby.
For a second, I believe they’re forgiven too. Then the melody breaks, warps back into whispered rhythm.
**“All your fault, Irina.”**
The machines keep their steady pulse. I close my eyes, feeling warmth gather at the edges of consciousness.
Maybe hell wasn’t under the skin after all.
Maybe it’s wherever grief becomes a chorus and refuses to stop singing.
- Writer
