Attic

The attic pressed in around him, a hollow place where breath turned visible and time felt slow, stretched thin over the wooden bones of the house. He hated working in the sticks in the winter—the way the cold seeped through his gloves, the way his truck’s engine whined in the morning frost. He hated crawling through these tight, forgotten spaces, where the air smelled like insulation and old wood, where his shoulders barely fit between the rafters, where a wrong step could send him crashing through drywall and into someone’s life uninvited.

It had happened once, years ago. A misstep, a splintering crack, then the sickening weightlessness of falling—arms flailing, fingers grabbing at air. He’d landed in a stranger’s living room, insulation snowing down around him, the homeowner staring, slack-jawed, from their recliner. He remembered the feeling of being utterly exposed, an intruder in his own mistake. Since then, attics made his skin prickle. The closeness of them. The way they forced his body into unnatural shapes, hunched and careful, like a trespasser moving through his own work.

He gritted his teeth against the memory, against the press of the low rafters, against the frostbitten resentment curling in his gut. The flashlight, clamped between his teeth, bobbed with every breath. Shadows stretched and shrank as he moved, wires twisting in his hands like veins beneath skin. He wiped sweat from his brow with his sleeve, though the air around him was cold, and shifted his balance on the beams. Beneath him, the dark expanse of drywall lay thin and waiting.

Then—the insulation.

A whisper against his nose, soft as a lover’s sigh. The itch bloomed slow at first, a teasing irritant, then grew insistent, needling. He tried to fight it, squinting, swallowing against the coming wave, but the sneeze surged up from deep inside him, uncontrollable.

It came like a gunshot, snapping his jaw shut with brutal finality.

A sound—sharp, splintering. Pain, blinding, electric. The flashlight fell, rolling end over end, its beam pirouetting wildly across the wooden beams. His tongue, probing, found the jagged ruins of his teeth, the raw, screaming nerves. A coppery taste flooded his mouth.

He froze.

The attic held him like a clenched fist, the silence vast and waiting. The pain was exquisite, sharp and immediate, but beneath it, something else stirred—a slow, sinking horror. A sense of betrayal, as if his own body had turned against him.

He spat, a wet thunk against the fluffy catalyst. A tooth, or what was left of one. His breath came quick and uneven. The dust still spun in the air like an afterthought, dancin through the beam of the dropped flashlight.

And yet, through the pain, through the lingering ache in his jaw, he thought of that moment of falling, years ago. The weightlessness. The inevitability.

And somehow, impossibly, this felt the same.