I fell through every layer, screaming without a throat, and slammed back into myself so hard I bit my tongue. Blood on the pillow. My mother never stopped knitting. The fever broke an hour later.
Don’t look back .
The tether yanked.
At fifty miles up, I met the others.
I looked back.
The Earth was a dime. My house was less than dust. My feverish body, that little animal pinned to a mattress, was already being forgotten by the universe. And that was the real terror. Not death. Scale . The absolute, hilarious indifference of altitude.
Not painfully. More like a rubber band letting go. I shot up through the roof, past the satellite dish, past the low clouds that felt like wet cotton against my face. The town shrank to a circuit board. Rivers became silver zippers. The curve of the Earth appeared, blue and brutal. I kept rising. I fell through every layer, screaming without a
That’s the part no one tells you: the silence. Down in the body, there’s always a hum—blood, digestion, the grind of molars. Up here, pure acoustic zero. I could have shouted her name until the walls bled sound. Nothing. I was a ghost in the only house I’d ever known.