Morning didn't arrive with a warm glow. It crept in through a gap in the curtains that wasn't quite closed, carrying a pale blade of light that sliced through the dust motes dancing in the room's air. I woke up not to an alarm, but to a piercing cold—as if someone had injected liquid nitrogen directly into the marrow of my bones. I tried to take a breath, the most basic act of a living thing, but all I found was resistance. My chest felt like a steel box that had been welded shut.
I lay still, staring at the ceiling where the paint was peeling like dead skin. A long crack stretched across it, resembling a map of a dried-up river. My mind drifted back to those temple stairs. Damn it. That climb had truly been the final blow to my fragile, rusted soul. Every step I forced myself to take yesterday felt like a sledgehammer blow to an engine that was already overheating. And now, the machine had completely stalled.
I tried to move my right arm. Heavy. It felt like trying to lift an iron bar buried in quicksand. My joints emitted a faint click—a protest from hardware that was long worn out. It took nearly two minutes just to slide my palm toward my chest. There, beneath a thin t-shirt dampened by cold sweat, I could feel my heartbeat. It no longer beat with a steady, gallop-like rhythm; it throbbed with a jagged static vibration, exactly like an old radio speaker with a frayed wire.
Crack.
The sound came again. Not from outside, but from within my trachea. Every time air tried to force its way in, it had to pass through a pile of "wet cement" clogging everything. I coughed. Just a small cough, but it felt like a rusted blade being dragged along my throat. The taste of iron—blood—began to seep at the base of my tongue. I forced myself to swallow the bitterness.
My eyes shifted to the corner of the wooden desk beside the bed. There, beneath a pile of overdue electricity bills, lay a dark glass ashtray. It was empty, but the bottom left a permanent black stain. I stared at it for a long time, and suddenly, a memory surfaced uninvited. The sharp scent of tobacco smoke, loud laughter on the hot asphalt streets, and the sheer arrogance of exhaling smoke into the night sky. Back then, I felt invincible with a cigarette tucked between my middle and index fingers. I felt that smoke was a part of my soul—wild and intangible.
Now, that smoke had mutated into a toxin crystallizing in my lungs. Every cigarette I smoked back then felt like a nail I was driving into my own coffin. I looked at my fingers, now pale and thin. There were no more yellow nicotine stains, just skin wrapped tightly over bone. My knuckles, once frequently bruised and scraped from hitting walls or stupid fights in narrow alleys to defend a worthless pride, were now too weak to even grasp the plastic cup within reach.
I tried to push myself up, forcing my elbows to support my body weight, which actually wasn't much at all. My head immediately throbbed. Black spots—radio static—returned to cloud my vision. My world swayed. I could feel cold sweat pouring from my temples, soaking a pillow that was starting to smell musty.
This house was so quiet. A very specific kind of silence. Not a peaceful silence, but a hollow one. No sound of plates clinking from the kitchen, no sound of the television humming, no sound of footsteps of parents getting ready for work. There was only the sound of the wall clock ticking with a mocking tone, and the sound of my creaking breath. This silence was the most honest reminder that I was truly alone inside this wreckage.
The walls of this room seemed to narrow, squeezing what little air remained around me. I looked toward the window. Out there, my world moved on without a care for me. People went to school, worked, laughed, and breathed for free. Meanwhile, I was here, having to gamble my life for just one meager breath.
I managed to sit on the edge of the bed, my feet touching the cold floor. The floor felt like ice. I looked down, seeing a pair of feet that no longer looked like they belonged to a teenage boy. They looked like they belonged to a corpse that someone forgot to bury. Weak and lifeless.
My gaze fell on a small, grey-covered notebook lying on the floor, having fallen from my jacket pocket last night. The Grey Notebook. It lay there silently, as if challenging me to pick it up and begin my new duty as an accountant of death. I stared at it with both hatred and necessity. That book was the only real thing now. Not hope, not prayer, but numbers that would keep decreasing.
"Fourteen days," I whispered, my voice sounding like paper being forcibly torn.
Two weeks. That was the time I had spent "falling" after that moment at the temple. My body had given up before my mind could even protest. I reached for the book with a hand that shook violently. As my fingertips touched its rough surface, I felt an odd sensation. It was as if this book was the only circuit still connected to my broken reality.
I wouldn't be going to school today. Maybe not tomorrow, either. Or next week. my school uniform hanging on the door looked like an old skin I had shed. It no longer fit me. I was no longer a student, I was no longer a bastard kid, I was just a frequency that had almost vanished.
I opened the first page. Blank. Pure white. But in my eyes, that page was already filled with grey shadows. I took the pen from the desk, trying to grip it properly. My hand resisted; its trembling made the tip of the pen dance erratically across the paper.
One.
I wrote the number small in the corner of the page. The first day of my isolated breakdown. The first day I officially admitted that I was a machine waiting for its decommissioning. I closed the book and lay my body back down on the hard mattress. My breath grew shorter, noisier.
Behind my tightly closed eyelids, I could still see The Pest's gaze under that streetlight. The gaze that stripped me bare. The gaze that knew that beneath the remnants of my pride as a former rebellious kid, I was just a hunk of meat that had failed to function.
"Welcome to the junkyard, Old Radio," I thought quietly, just before consciousness was slowly pulled back into the suffocating darkness.
Every inch of muscle in my legs felt as though it had been replaced by tightly pulled barbed wire. I tried to shift even slightly on the mattress, and instantly, a wave of sharp pain slammed into my waist, crawling up my spine like a short-circuiting electrical current. The penalty was real. Those stone stairs at the temple hadn't just drained my breath; they had shattered the mechanical foundation of my body.
I stared at my legs hidden beneath a thin, dingy blanket. I remembered how I had forced them to keep climbing yesterday, hitting every stone step with sheer stubbornness, ignoring every danger signal my nervous system sent out. Now, those legs felt foreign. They were heavy, internally swollen, and constantly throbbing in sync with my weak heartbeat. This wasn't just exhaustion; it was degradation.
"Damn it," I hissed, but the word ended with a long, thin wheeze in my throat.
Every time I tried to draw in oxygen, that high-pitched whistling sound surfaced—a melody of wreckage indicating that my airways were narrowing, strangled by an invisible swelling. I felt like I was breathing through a pinched plastic straw. In a silence this profound, the sound of my own breath was a horror. I was a mistuned musical instrument, emitting discordant noises that had no business being in the body of a seventeen-year-old.
I remembered The Pest's gaze when I collapsed at the foot of the hill. The thumbs-up she gave me. Now, that gesture felt like a sarcastic mockery. She knew this would happen. She knew this junk machine would pay dearly for every stair it climbed. She wasn't encouraging me; she was marking the point where I truly began to fall apart physically.
Thirst began to set in, burning my dry, iron-residue-filled throat. I turned toward the small desk beside the bed. There was a glass of water that had been sitting there since last night, its surface covered by a thin layer of dust. The distance wasn't even a meter, but to me, that glass felt like it was on another mountain peak.
I tried to gather my strength. I took as deep a breath as I could—though it triggered a sharp sting in my left chest—then with a painful lurch, I moved my body to reach for the glass.
CRASH!!
My trembling hand instead knocked the glass over, sending it crashing onto the wooden floor. Water spilled, seeping into the cracks of the weathered wood, leaving a dark, wet stain. The plastic cup rolled away, stopping right in front of the cluttered bookshelf.
I froze, my hand still hanging in mid-air. My chest heaved rapidly. Tears of frustration nearly fell, not because of the spilled water, but because of the fact that I couldn't even perform the simplest task to stay alive. I felt so useless. Once, with these hands, I could climb tall fences, carry heavy groceries to defy the world, or simply light a match in a gale. Now? These hands were betraying me for a cup of water.
I threw myself back down harshly. The penalty of the stone stairs didn't just hit my physique, but also my ego as a former bastard kid used to being independent. In this house, there was no one. There was no hand to pick up that cup for me. No one to wipe the cold sweat from my forehead. My mother—wherever she was now, perhaps drowning in her work or an endless escape—left only an empty space and the bitter scent of memories.
I closed my eyes, trying to find silence in my head, but all I heard was the echo of my footsteps on those temple stairs. Thud. Thud. Thud. Every footfall now translated into a throb of pain in my knees. I imagined The Pest standing up there, looking out over the city in peace while I rotted away here.
Was she writing something in her notebook right now? Was she noting that the Old Radio had reached its voltage limit?
I opened my eyes again, staring at the ceiling that felt lower and lower. I couldn't give in to this pain now. If I did, I would die of a ridiculous thirst on this mattress. With a burst of strength fueled by anger, I crawled to the edge of the bed, letting my body slide to the floor.
Thud.
The cold floor greeted my face. I groaned, feeling dust enter my nose, triggering a violent coughing fit. I coughed until my body curled like a shrimp, clutching a chest that felt like it wanted to explode. Every cough produced a louder, more broken crack.
Once the attack subsided, I dragged my body across the floor, ignoring the painful friction on the skin of my arms. I reached for the plastic cup that had fallen. Empty. But there was a bit of spilled water on the floor that hadn't soaked in yet. Without shame, without a shred of pride left, I pressed my lips to the cold floor, sipping the remaining moisture just to cool my burning throat.
I laughed. A broken laugh that sounded more like a sob.
"Look at you, bastard kid," I whispered to my own reflection in the water on the floor. "You really are just a piece of scrap now."
I leaned my back against the bedpost, my breath still heavy and full of whistles. I looked toward the Grey Notebook I had written in earlier. The number One seemed to glow in the dim room. This first day wasn't over yet, and I was already forced to crawl on the floor like an animal.
The penalty wasn't finished. Those stone stairs were just the beginning of a downward journey that was far steeper and darker. And I, with this smoking engine, had to find a way not to shatter into pieces before reaching the end of the page in that book.
I was still slumped on the floor, leaning against the cold bedpost. My eyes drifted back to the glass ashtray at the corner of the desk. In the dim light, that ashtray looked like a small altar for my own stupid past.
An odd urge stirred in my chest. It wasn't just the usual tightness, but a very specific itch at the back of my throat. An itch I used to cure with a single click of a gas lighter and a long drag of tobacco smoke.
"One more drag, and your world will be calm," a voice surfaced from the dark corners of my memory. It was my own voice—the voice of the bastard kid from three years ago who thought the hot asphalt of the streets belonged to him.
I gave a weak snort, but all that came out was a dry grating sound in my trachea. "Calm, my ass," I whispered bitterly. "That 'calm' you wanted was just a subtle way of turning these lungs into a junkyard."
I forced my hand to reach for the bottom drawer of the desk. With a heavy pull and a pitiful groan of wood, the drawer creaked open. There, tucked behind a pile of old comic books with yellowed pages, was a crumpled cigarette pack. I picked it up. It was empty, leaving only the stale scent of tobacco that still clung stubbornly. I inhaled the scent deeply, searching for that sensation of "freedom" I used to worship.
Instantly, my lungs revolted.
A coughing fit, far more brutal than before, exploded. I choked, my body lunging forward until my forehead nearly hit the wooden floor. Crack! Crack! Crack! The sound from my chest this time was no longer like a radio; it was like a grinder forced to crush coal. Every cough brought a searing heat, as if there were still glowing embers burning inside my airways, refusing to go out.
I spat something into my palm. A thick, greyish fluid speckled with dark, heavy red. I stared at the fluid, gasping for air.
"Look at your masterpiece," one side of my mind judged. "You used to say smoking was so you'd look like you had a 'soul'; now your own life is being burned into ash like this."
I stared at the soot in my palm. The suffocating feeling wasn't just from the lack of oxygen, but from the fact that I was the one who helped this disease destroy me. I used to think smoke was a barrier between me and the chaos of life. Turns out, that smoke was just a curtain hiding the fact that I was digging my own grave with style.
"Why was I so stupid back then?" I asked the silence of the room. "Just to be seen as cool by the kids at the terminal, I was willing to trade my future breath for a roll of burning paper."
I remembered the first time I smoked behind the school. I felt like the king of the streets when that smoke curled out of my nose. Now, that image felt disgusting. The "Me" from back then felt like a stranger who had just sabotaged the engine of the plane I'm piloting now. He was the culprit, and I was the victim—even though we occupied the same body.
I crushed the empty cigarette pack until it was mangled in my grip.
"Don't bother regretting it now," that voice mocked again. "Weren't you the one who said 'death is death, as long as I've got style'? Here's the style you wanted. Sitting on the floor, gasping, holding onto grey phlegm. Cool, right?"
"Enough," I growled. I threw the crushed pack into the corner of the room.
This house no longer had the aroma of cooking. It only smelled of dust, the carbolic scent of my leftover medicine, and the stale tobacco of a past that refused to die. I felt like a stranger in my own home. Thebastard kid who used to feel like the toughest guy on the street now had to admit that his fists meant nothing compared to a single breath of fresh air that he could no longer buy.
I tried to steady my breathing, slowly, following a very deliberate rhythm. I closed my eyes and imagined my lungs as an old engine, rusted and covered in soot. I tried to "clean" it with every small intake of air, but every time I tried, I only felt the painful friction of metal on metal.
I reached for the pen again, my hand still shaking. Beneath the number One, I wrote a short sentence, the ink nearly bleeding through the paper:
[ The soot refuses to leave. I am breathing in the ash I made myself. ]
I snapped the book shut. The whistling sound of my breath still filled the room, competing with the merciless ticking of the wall clock. This first day of my second week of isolation was still very long. I realized that I wasn't just fighting a disease; I was serving a sentence for every cigarette I had arrogantly burned.
The silence in this house had a weight of its own. It wasn't merely the absence of sound, but something that pressed against the chest walls, filling every corner of the room like an invisible toxic gas. I forced myself up from the floor, dragging my legs—which still felt like iron bars—toward the bedroom door that stood slightly ajar. Outside, the hallway looked like the mouth of a cold, dark cave.
There was no scent of oil being heated in a pan. No sound of water splashing from the bathroom. This house had long since lost its heartbeat, precisely since the machines at the steel mill decided to stop functioning correctly five years ago.
I walked past the living area, passing a football that lay in the corner, covered in dust so thick that its once white-and-black pattern had turned a dull, matted grey. I stopped for a moment, staring at the round object. Once, that ball was half my life. I remembered running on the red dirt field until twilight, kicking it with all my might until my breath felt hot yet liberating. Back then, my lungs were a turbo engine that never tired. Now, just looking at the ball made my chest throb with the memory of the oxygen that used to be so abundant.
I turned toward the old wooden cabinet in the corner of the living room. There, amidst the layers of dust, sat a small, tilted picture frame. I reached for it with a hand that still shook.
It was my kindergarten graduation photo.
In the photo, I stood in the center with a gown that was far too large, grinning to show off my missing teeth. To my left, Dad stood in his tidy factory uniform, his rough hand resting on my shoulder with pride. To my right, Mom smiled widely—the kind of smile I hadn't seen in years. We looked like a complete circuit. A system running perfectly with no signs of damage.
"Look at Dad's hand," a voice whispered in my head.
Dad's hand in that photo was still whole. Five strong fingers. I brushed the surface of the frame's glass, right over Dad's face. I remembered that day—not the graduation, but the day everything broke. The day a steel cable at the factory snapped and the grinding machine couldn't be stopped in time. a split second of mechanical failure, but the impact shattered our entire life's frequency. Dad didn't die that day, but half of his soul remained under those factory machines, leaving behind a man who was depressed, disabled, and eventually surrendered to fate a year later.
Mom? Mom was the component that tried to hold the weight of that short circuit alone until she finally burned out. She started working overtime, leaving before sunrise and returning when I was already asleep, until eventually, she chose to become a total stranger—present in the house only as a passing shadow, too tired to look into my eyes, which grew more like Dad's every day before he left.
"Why didn't you guys just take me with you back then?" I muttered, my voice cracking in the middle of the hollow room.
I gripped the photo frame. This suffocating feeling wasn't from cigarette soot anymore, but from a loss that had crystallized. I was the leftover product of a family destroyed by bad luck. Dad was defeated by a machine, and now I was being defeated by my own biology. It was as if our bloodline was destined to be nothing more than useless scrap.
I stared at the football in the corner and the photo in my hand. Two different pasts. One was a time when I had strength, and the other was a time when I had protectors. Now, both were just historical junk cluttering this house.
The walls of this house seemed to whisper, reminding me that no one would come to save me if my breath suddenly stopped tonight. I was an orphan in the most pathetic sense: my parents might still exist in my memory or somewhere out there, but their existence no longer transmitted a signal in my direction.
I returned the photo to its original position—still tilted, still dusty. I didn't have the energy to clean it. I dragged my steps back to the room, passing the ball I could no longer kick. Every step was a reminder that I was walking inside a vast graveyard called home.
I reached for the Grey Notebook I'd left on the bed. Beneath the line about the ash I'd made myself, I added another row:
[ This house is no longer a place to live. It's a junkyard, and I am the last item waiting to be discarded. ]
I closed my eyes, letting the silence of the house envelop me. My creaking breath was the only sign of life in this building, a tiny frequency struggling alone amidst the waves of darkness beginning to swallow everything.
I sat on the edge of the mattress, staring at my reflection in the cracked wardrobe mirror in the corner of the room. Slowly, with hands still trembling from the remnants of the latest breathing fit, I unbuttoned my school shirt one by one. Every movement was a torture, as if the fabric had fused with my skin. As the shirt fell open, I froze, staring at the reflection of my own torso.
On the left side of my abdomen, just above the waist, there was a jagged tear in my dull white undershirt. The fabric was ripped, leaving a crude hole surrounded by hardened, brownish stains. I touched the edge of the wound on my skin beneath that tear—a long, raised scar, the result of a messy stitch job I had done myself a year ago.
Then my eyes moved up toward the collar. There, tucked behind the fold of the fabric that touched my neck, remained a smudge of dried, faded blood. That blood wasn't entirely mine. It was the residue of the night I stopped being just a school kid and started being the "bastard kid" everyone feared at the terminal intersection.
I remembered that night. The night that gang of market thugs cornered me just because I refused to hand over my side-job earnings from the mechanic shop. They thought I was easy prey—an orphan who looked thin and quiet. They were dead wrong. When the folding knife of one of them tore into my stomach, something inside my head simply snapped. Instead of running, I felt "alive" for the first time.
I defended myself in the most brutal way possible. I didn't care about the wound in my gut; I kept slamming my head into their leader's nose, scratching, biting, and using every ounce of rage from my father's death to crush them one by one. The blood that splattered onto my collar that night felt warm—a disgusting medal of victory.
"You used to be proud of that blood," one side of my mind mocked. "You felt strong because you made those thugs run for their lives. Now? Even this shirt feels too heavy for you to wear."
I gave a dry laugh, a sound more like an engine choking on gasoline. True. Back then, my rebelliousness was my shield. I became a bastard kid because the world had treated me like trash ever since Dad's accident. I fought not because I was evil, but because I had no other way to show that I still existed, that I still had a loud "frequency" in a city trying to silence me.
But now, look at me. This scar on my stomach no longer feels like a badge of honor. It's just a reminder that I once had muscles I could rely on, energy I could detonate. Now, those muscles have withered. My skin wraps around my ribs so tightly it makes me look more like a skeleton than a human.
I touched the dried blood on the collar with my fingertip. It felt coarse, like sand. Just like my life now—coarse, dry, and full of the remnants of useless violence. What's the point of winning a duel against market thugs if I end up losing to a single unseen enemy inside my own chest?
"Those thugs would probably laugh if they saw me now," I whispered. "They don't need a knife to kill me. Just wait for me to climb some stairs, and I'll die all on my own."
That suffocating feeling returned, this time seasoned with a heavy dose of shame. I remembered how I used to look down on the weak kids at school, the ones who could only stay silent when bullied. Now, I am weaker than anyone. I am a piece of junk that can't even wash the bloodstains off its own clothes.
I tossed the shirt into the pile of dirty laundry in the corner. I didn't need that uniform anymore. That uniform belonged to a bastard kid who had the strength to rebel. I am now just a patient without a room number, an accountant counting down the ticks of a wall clock.
I traced the scar on my stomach once more. It felt cold. It used to feel like a burning fire, a symbol of the rage consuming my soul. Now the fire has gone out, leaving nothing but a pile of ash and soot in my lungs.
I reached for the Grey Notebook lying beside my pillow. My pale finger danced across the paper, adding a new entry beneath the line about the junkyard house:
[ The scar on my stomach has grown cold. My rage has turned to ash. I won the duel against the world, but I'm losing the duel against myself. ]
I closed the book and lay back down, letting my "naked" body, covered in marks and scars, be enveloped by the damp darkness of the room. My breath still creaked, crack-crack, a sound reminding me that inside, my primary engine was grinding and stalling making its final stand before finally ceasing to turn.
The sun was nearly gone, leaving behind a sickly orange glow on my bedroom walls. I was trying to close my eyes, attempting to drown myself in the drowsiness triggered by an overwhelming exhaustion, when a sudden sound broke the silence.
Tink.
A faint impact against the windowpane. I jolted, my chest reacting instantly with an erratic thumping. I stayed still, thinking it was just a tree branch or a hallucination from my oxygen-starved brain.
Tink. Tink.
Harder this time. I dragged my body toward the window, peeling back the curtain with agonizingly slow movements. Down there, in my front yard filled with wild weeds and piles of scrap metal left behind by Dad, stood a figure I knew all too well.
The Pest. She stood there in her oversized jacket, her small hand still clutching a few pebble. As soon as she saw my face behind the glass, she didn't smile. Instead, she flicked one last pebble directly toward my forehead—luckily blocked by the glass. She gave a sharp jerk of her chin, signaling me to come down.
I wanted to ignore her, but there was something in her eyes that always forced me to comply. With heavy breaths and trembling legs, I went downstairs and opened the rusted back door with a pitiful groan of metal.
The outside air hit me. Sharp and cold. I stood in the doorway, gripping the frame so I wouldn't collapse. The Pest stood about three meters away, scanning me from head to toe with a gaze that seemed to be counting the remaining bolts holding my body together.
"What... are you doing here?" I asked, my voice hoarse and thin.
She didn't answer. Instead, she stepped closer, circling me as if she were inspecting a piece of junk on the side of the road. She stopped right in front of me, then pulled out her small notebook. She wrote something without any expression, then shoved it in front of my face.
[ "Long time no see. I thought you'd turned into a ghost on those temple stairs. Turns out you were just hiding here." ]
I snorted, which triggered a painful little cough. "Those stairs... they killed the engine."
The Pest pulled back her book, writing again with quick, steady hand movements.
[ "You smell like dust. Your room must be a mess. Put on your jacket if you're going to stand outside, Old Radio. Your breathing is getting noisier." ]
"You just came here to insult the way I smell?" I whispered, trying to take a deep breath. "Just leave if you only want to mock me."
She stared at me for a long time. There was a pause where she just stood still, letting the evening wind play with her hair. Then, she wrote one last short sentence.
[ "I'm passing by here again tomorrow. Don't die yet before I get a chance to throw the rest of these pebbles." ]
I was stunned. Her words weren't sweet; in fact, they were annoying. But behind the phrase "Don't die yet," I could feel a slight pull. It was as if she were attaching a thin wire to me so I wouldn't drift too far into the darkness. She didn't ask how I was; she only asked me to still "be there" when she passed by tomorrow.
The Pest suddenly stepped closer, just a single pace away. I could smell a very faint scent of soap on her, a sharp contrast to the smell of cold sweat and dust clinging to my body. She looked toward my chest, as if she could hear the muffled crack trapped inside.
She raised her hand, and with a swift motion, she flicked my forehead hard.
"Ow! Damn it!" I groaned, clutching my forehead.
She simply gave me a thumbs-up—the same gesture as at the foot of the hill—but this time without any excessive pressure. Just a cold "okay" sign. She turned around, preparing to leave past my tilted front fence.
"Pest!" I called out.
She stopped, but didn't turn around completely.
"I'm still not dead today," I said, trying to straighten my back even though it felt like it might snap.
She didn't write anything else. She just waved her hand without looking back, then disappeared around the bend of the road as it began to grow dark.
I stood there alone in the silent yard. Yet, for the first time in fourteen days, the heaviness in my chest felt a little lighter. Not because my illness was cured, but because another frequency had just collided with my silence.
I went back inside, dragging my feet to my room, and reached for the Grey Notebook. Beneath the last entry, I wrote with what little strength I felt:
[ The Pest came by. She said my breathing is noisy and told me to wear a jacket. I guess this Pest doesn't like seeing her junk break down ahead of schedule. ]
I closed the book. My breath still creaked, but that crack didn't sound so pitiful anymore. It sounded like a resistance that had just begun again.
I returned to my room with shorter breaths, yet my heart thumped with a different rhythm. The flick on my forehead still lingered—a small, warm throb against the cold skin of my face. I stood before the cracked wardrobe mirror, staring at my own reflection under the dim, flickering of the naked bulb.
Slowly, I raised my hand, touching the spot where The Pest's finger had landed. It was strange. That flick wasn't just physical pain; it felt like a forced electric shock delivered into a system that had already become trash. For two weeks, I had only been touched by pain and silence. But just now, there was an external physical intervention that demanded my attention.
"Don't die yet before I get a chance to throw the rest of these pebbles," the voice in my head repeated her written words.
I stripped off my shirt, letting it fall to the floor like an old snakeskin. Now, I was truly facing what was left of me. In the mirror, a teenage boy stared back with hollow, dark eyes. My ribs protruded sharply, forming lines that were far too clear beneath pale, almost transparent skin. Every time I drew a breath, my chest rose with great effort, revealing how thin the boundary was between me and the void.
I stared at the scar on my stomach, then moved to my shrinking shoulders. I tried to remember the "bastard kid" who was once feared. The one with muscle, the one with color in his face. Now, all that remained was a mechanical frame forced to keep running on low residual voltage.
"Why does she even bother coming here?" I whispered to the reflection.
Did she see something I couldn't? Or was she just an antique collector who enjoyed watching the decay of a piece of scrap? That flick on the forehead felt like her way of saying I still had a "surface" that could be touched, that I hadn't yet become a total shadow.
I leaned closer to the glass. Static spots began to dance again at the edges of my vision. An overwhelming exhaustion hit me once more, as if my body were collecting a debt for the minor activity I'd just performed in the yard. Every joint began to throb with pain, and the whistling in my lungs grew louder, demanding I surrender to gravity.
I switched off the bedroom light, letting the darkness swallow that pathetic shadow. I crawled onto the bed, pulling the dusty-smelling thin blanket up to my chin. My body trembled—not from the cold, but because this engine had truly reached its overheat point.
I closed my eyes. In that darkness, I didn't see a terrifying death. Instead, I saw The Pest's flat expression and her annoying thumbs-up. That cold gesture had somehow become the only frequency I could catch amidst the signal interference in my head.
"Tomorrow..." I murmured softly, the word nearly vanishing before it could leave my lips.
I had to stay "on" until tomorrow. Not because I feared God or because I wanted to get well, but because I didn't want to miss the next pebble throw. I wanted to know what other ridiculous message she would write in her notebook.
As my thoughts began to blur, I let my consciousness sink. The ticking of the wall clock and the whistle of my breath slowly merged into a bitter lullaby. I surrendered to sleep, letting my junk body rest in its own warehouse, hoping that when I opened my eyes again, my frequency would still be there—still humming, even if it was just the sound of a broken crack.
That night, for the first time in two weeks, I didn't dream of smoke or blood. I only dreamed of the sound of pebbles hitting a windowpane.