THIS IS YOUR DOING

Too narrow for breath, too wide to end. Each step multiplies itself, so I am forever behind and forever ahead. The walls lean closer, listening.

I’m back in the school hallway.

The tiles shine too bright, scrubbed raw. Fluorescent lights buzz above, cold and flickering. The air reeks of disinfectant and cafeteria grease. My feet move on their own, carrying me where I already know I’m going—like I wrote this script and now regret every line.

The intercom crackles.

“Ashley—principal’s office. Immediately.”

I turn the corner.

My mother waits outside the office, lips pressed so tightly they’ve vanished. She clutches her purse like a weapon. Her eyes don’t blink.

Inside, the math teacher sits pale and trembling. The printouts lie on the desk—the edited photos I made “as a joke.” Him crouched behind a bush, pants down. Fake, but real enough to spread like infection. Real enough to ruin.

He had to transfer schools.

“I was trying to be funny,” I whisper.

“You were trying to control the narrative,” my mother replies, voice sharp as ice. “You broke someone, Ashley.”

The room freezes. The air cracks.

And then—wrong.

The hallway melts into a bathroom stall. Moans seep through the door. The teacher again—humiliated, replaying the photo in an endless loop. The stalls open one by one, each revealing his ruined face.

Behind me, my mother’s voice:

“This is your doing. You made this.”

I run—straight into another place.

Stone under my hands, recoiling like flesh. Cold metal against my spine. I’m lying naked beneath surgical lights, rigid, eyes wide but unseen. The air smells of latex and iron.

Gloved hands hover over me. A flat voice:

“Subject is female. Eighteen. Cause of death: inconclusive.”

No. I scream inside my head. I kick, I push. Nothing moves.

“Beginning internal examination.”

The scalpel lowers. I feel not pain, only pressure, as if I’ve already been demoted to object, specimen, mistake.

And then a laugh. Mine.

Another me stands in scrubs, clipboard in hand.

“You always wanted control,” she says.
“Now look at you. Finally still. Finally quiet.”
“This is your doing. You made this.”

The scalpel glints. My body remains motionless.

The scene falls apart—dissolving into ash.

I drift through a dead sky. The sun is a pale blister overhead. The world below is dust, split earth, skeletons of buildings. No birds. No water. Only silence stretched too far.

Movement.

A child stumbles barefoot across the cracked ground, dragging an empty plastic bottle. Her lips are white, her eyes too big. Her hair sticks to her face.

It’s me.
Me as a child.

The soil behind her splits. At first a whisper, then a roar. Something claws upward. Black, sinewy, grinning with too many teeth. Tar dripping from its skin.

She runs. She can’t.

I scream her name. Too late.

The thing swallows her whole. Her voice fades into the dust:

“This is your doing. You made this.”

When I reach the spot, only the bottle remains. And one shoe. My shoe.

The wind rises, but it can’t cover the silence.

And then, one last place.

A room. Bare. Dim. Silent.

A mirror waits.

My reflection lags, moves without me, eyes obeying rules I never signed. Behind her, the child appears again—silent, aching.

I reach for her. Glass meets my skin. Cold.

“This is my doing,” I whisper.
“I made this.”

The mirror shakes. The little girl still stares at me, those wide eyes asking not for forgiveness—only presence. I almost collapse again into the toxic mantra—this is my doing—when another voice cuts the air.

Not the principal’s. Not the echo of the neon lights. Lower. Firmer. Mine.

“Enough.”

She stands behind me in the mirror: the third me. Not a child. Not a girl. A woman who does not tremble. She looks at me like a trapped animal, cornered but still alive.

“You’re done playing the guilty one. That’s not what she needs.”
Her finger points at the little girl, steady as stone.

I start to stammer, but she silences me:
“Either you take her hand now, or you leave her to die here. There won’t be a third chance.”

The lights stop flickering. The bathroom stalls vanish. The surgical lamps blink out like dying suns. Even the wasteland begins to crumble—its dust drawn back into the earth, its silence torn apart. The voices sputter, collapsing one by one until there is only breath.

Only us.

I reach out. Small fingers grasp mine, stronger than roots.

---

“This is not my doing.”

“I’m taking you out of here.”

The mirror shatters. The shadows collapse.

Ashley gasps awake.

For the first time, the reflection in the glass is whole.

So I faced my fears. But a part of me still wonders what might happen if I keep falling—deeper and darker—into the shadows of my own soul.  

Stay tuned. And be afraid of what might come next.