The people in the stalls do not touch me. They never do. That doesn’t stop my terror.

How old was I when the dream started? Two? Three? I don’t know.

I remember waking from it screaming after the car hit me, trapped inside the heavy white plaster shell wrapped around my body from toes to clavicle. Heat gathered below the wrappings, my skin itching where I couldn’t reach. The cast pinned me flat and useless in the dark while my own screams bounced off the bedroom walls.

When I described the dream to my mother through choking sobs, she smoothed my hair, one of the few places still uncovered and touchable, and told me it was just my imagination. Just like before.

I was four then. The cast was new. The dream wasn’t.

I wake from a dead sleep crying. It’s the same childhood nightmare, back after decades, sudden and whole, shredding my tissue-like sleep. One second I am breathing slowly beside my husband. The next, I am back there again.

My husband’s hand rests on my arm where he has been trying to shake me awake. I shove him away before I even understand where I am.

“You were screaming,” he says. Even through the bedroom’s dark, beneath the irritation of being awake, I hear the worry in his voice.

“It... it was a bad dream.” My fists hover near my face like a boxer guarding her jaw. I force them down to my sides. “Sorry,” I add, weakly.

“It’s stress,” he says, as if this is the only answer. “You’re worried about this job interview. It’s okay. We’ll be okay no matter what happens.”

“That must be it,” I agree.

But it isn’t. And he is wrong.

We need me to get this job. We are drowning, not all at once, but it is happening. I feel like a swimmer abandoned miles from shore, scanning the horizon for a rescue boat that will never appear. My legs grow heavier with every passing minute. The water presses against me from all sides. Each kick buys a little less time than the one before it. Keeping my head above the surface takes everything I have, and still I can feel myself sinking.

Slow can kill you too, and it’s a lot fucking crueler.

The interview goes well. I’m nervous, but I’ve done my research. I understand their market, the job responsibilities, the awkward little niche their technology fills. I’m slightly overqualified, which usually works against you in interviews like this, but experienced people are hard to find. As long as I don’t panic, overshare, or accidentally call the interviewer by the wrong name, I have a good shot.

At the end of the interview, she taps her notes into a neat stack and smiles at me over the top edge of the folder. “Well,” she says, “I think I can tell you now that you’re our top applicant.”

I smile back, and this time it’s genuine. Relief loosens my chest as I let go of something I hadn’t realized I’d been holding to for weeks. “That’s wonderful. Should we talk about next steps?”

“Soon,” she replies. “But first, would you like a tour of the production facilities?”

“I’d love that.”

I stand and start gathering my things, but she lifts one hand. “Unfortunately, you can’t take your phone or personal items with you since you’re not an employee…yet.” She gives me a bright, practiced smile. “Too much proprietary work on the floor. We’ll lock the office when we leave and swing back by on the way out.”

Something cold flickers through me. I glance down at my purse resting against the chair leg, my phone half-hidden inside it. The office suddenly feels farther from the front entrance than it did ten seconds ago.

But what am I supposed to say? No?

I can’t.

“Oh... okay.”

I follow her down a long hallway lined with bright glass offices toward a bank of elevators. These are different from the ones I took up from the lobby. Those sat out in the open near reception. These hide deeper inside the building behind a locked door she opens with a keycard.

My stomach tightens.

We step into the elevator. She uses an actual key this time, not a badge, then taps a code into the small black keypad beneath the floor buttons.

The elevator drops, fast and heavy. My stomach lifts as the numbers above the door tick downward past the lobby level, past parking, past anything I realized existed beneath the building. I almost ask how deep the facility runs, but the question dies in my throat when the elevator dings and the doors slide open.

We exit to a different-looking space. It’s not the industrial gray and short blue industrial carpet I expected from a research facility. It looks wrong. It smells wrong. The air is dry and hot, like overheated wiring coated in dust.

We pass through another set of doors.

Beyond them stretches a long white hallway. It is bright, blindingly bright. One side is blank. The other side is clad in rough clapboards. The boards are nailed haphazardly to the uprights. Some are crooked and overlapping, leaving gaps to the stalls beyond. The nails are old, heavy, iron. They look hand forged.

The stalls sit open at regular intervals. Beyond, the rooms glow red, not from any light source in the walls or ceiling, but from the figures resting on the plain clapboard benches bolted to the walls.

The figures pulse softly, heat shimmering around them. Some are small, child-sized. Others are broad-shouldered and heavy, stripped down to muscle and tendon. Some bodies curve. Their heads tilt toward me as I pass.

When I was little, we had an old Edison Quartz heater in our bathroom with two glowing red tubes behind a metal grate. In the middle of winter, the coils would hum softly while my mother bathed me. I hated that heater. I hated the smell of hot dust rising from it. Hated the way the red bars glowed brighter when you got too close, as if it were alive somehow.

This feels like standing inside that heater.

I turn toward my interviewer. I don’t even know what I’m trying to ask. My throat has gone tight with panic.

But she isn’t beside me now. She has stepped back into the elevator without me noticing.

She watches me from inside with an expression I can’t fully read. Pity maybe. Maybe amusement. As if I brought this on myself. The doors close, and I am alone.

I walk, stiff-legged, past another stall. The heat presses harder against my skin with every step.

Inside the nearest stall, one of the figures rises from the bench.

Then another.

Their movements look wrong. Not stiff exactly, but uncertain, as though each knee and elbow requires a moment's thought before it bends.

They step toward the opening.

Toward me.

One reaches out.

For my entire life, in every dream, they have never touched me. Never, not once. They only watched while I ran screaming past the stalls.

But now the glowing hand closes around my wrist.

And oh God.

It burns.

It burns.

It burns.

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If you enjoyed this story, take a look at my serialized novel and some of my other short fiction here.

Garden of Little Peace--A Serialized Romantic Suspense Novel

The past calls them both. But so does love. If you're interested in the invisible forces that pull people together, come read along!

By Muirae D Kenney

If you’ve ever dreamt of opening a bookstore, come read along as I cover all the ins and outs of opening one.

Stories from a Dead Bookstore

I spent almost 13 years behind the counter, working the day-to-day, listening to what readers loved & what published authors had to say. My Substack will help you reach your goal, whether that's writing a successful novel or opening your own bookshop.

By Muirae D Kenney

The headlines will not stop shouting.

They shout in the same clipped, breathless way

every day now, like someone wound them up

and set them on a shelf,

where they rattle and tick like an anxious clock

crying beep, beep, beep,

long after the off button has failed.

The sound is steady and unreasonable,

as if it cannot imagine

anyone wanting quiet.

-

The headlines will not stop shouting.

I pour coffee and try to focus

on the quiet kindness of my chair and cup.

But still they seep through the walls:

a muffled chorus of fear and half-truths,

shouting, shouting, shouting.

-

Soon I imagine the anchors sitting at my kitchen table

straight-backed and hands folded,

delivering catastrophe in conversational tones.

One dips a spoon into my sugar bowl

to sweeten the latest update

on who will be sent away

without warning or recourse.

_

What does it cost us

to keep insisting this is normal?

-

When I step outside, I see the whole neighborhood

flinching at every loud bang,

women holding keys between their fingers,

old men reading the street like a perimeter

of duty that followed them home,

children learning the art of listening

from footsteps behind them.

_

And when the evening finally settles

the headlines are still shouting.

They have followed me to the couch

and taken up a spot at my elbow,

Crowding in beside me

like this was always their usual seat.

-

They watch me with bright, hungry eyes

certain there will be more

of this persistent alarm solo

we were foolish enough to set

and now cannot figure out

how to end.

©M D Kenney 2025

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Now, go enjoy Billy’s wonderful Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House

There’s nothing I can tell you

That you won’t learn in time

Alone, without my help.

But I’m used to saying

“Here, let me show you...”

How to walk, hold a spoon,

tie a shoe.

Now I’m the one

that has to learn

how to walk away,

hold my tongue,

tie a knot in my heart,

And let you fail

or fly without me.

A dozen years my job

was to keep you from hurt.

No one ever told me

this would be so hard,

to stand silent, to let go.

No one ever told me

these wobbling steps

toward adulthood

Would have me once again

aching to reach out,

snatch you back,

Save you from knowing

all the other ways

the world can be hard,

At least for a few years more.

—M D Kenney

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More from Muirae Kenney

A small-town North Carolina bookstore owner with a dangerous sensitivity to other people’s emotions becomes entangled in a murder, forcing her to navigate the pull of the brilliant ex-husband she never escaped and the tempting comfort of the detective who sees her too clearly.

Garden of Little Peace--A Serialized Romantic Suspense Novel

The past calls them both. But so does love. If you're interested in the invisible forces that pull people together, come read along!

By Muirae D Kenney

© 2026 Muirae D. Kenney. All posts on The Everything Drawer are original works. Please share links, not copies.

Meggie’s newest work of art--blue crayon on pink construction paper--describes our town in little girl simplicity. Houses resemble drunken boxes wearing triangle hats, jammed together on bowling alley streets.

Down the centermost her father, a tall, handsome stick figure, strides into town toward a smiling moppet that is Meggie herself. She has her stick figure arms raised in welcome.

I search the drawing again and find a tiny person atop a faraway hill, back turned, moving toward the edge of her cotton candy landscape. The figure is blurred, like a runner caught on slow film.

This, I realize, is me.

My little water sprite studies her drawing over my arm, her seaweed hair tangled and her seawater eyes bright. She wraps one hand around my elbow, the other a tight fist by her mouth.

Meggie has been the center of my universe since she rode the wave out of my womb six years ago. My love for her has a ferocity I didn’t foresee back when David convinced me to start a family.

Why has she drawn our family this way? She’ll tell me if I ask. She wants me to ask.

But I don’t ask. I don’t want to know.

Usually I love to delve into her drawings: the seashore visit that read like an alien attack, and our cat, Raffles, chasing a blue kite over the setting moon, which Meggie swears is easier and more real than a cow jumping it.

This I’d rather leave to guessing. I take the simpler route and believe she’s in that stage where Daddy seems perfect and Momma gets in the way, rather than hear whatever tumbles in her head about our life.

“Let’s hang this up so Daddy will see it,” I say to her, rising from my chair.

She clings to my arm across the room in a way she knows I dislike.

“Meghan, let go.” I suppress a sigh and clip the drawing onto the line strung just for this purpose, looped under our high clerestory windows. Within their frame I see the blue sky beyond and the upper branches of our oaks dancing in the wind.

What would it be like to be a bird upon one of those branches, free to fly in any direction?

I reach up one hand and place it flat against the pane.

I feel Meggie tug on my sleeve again. “Momma. Don’t you want me to tell you about my picture?” I can’t tell if her tone is coaxing or hurt.

I want to shake off her grip and stand under the oak trees, feel the wind on my skin, if only for a little while. I want to be me, alone, separate again and still whole.

I feel like I’m drowning.

But there is my beautiful kelpie child clinging to my hand, and how I love her. I unclip her drawing from the line and sit back down.

Meggie smiles and slides into my lap. She settles herself against me. I feel as if I should warn her to go slow and take small bites, like any good mother would, but I remain silent as she takes a deep breath. As she speaks I look out at the oaks swaying behind the glass, and I dream of flying.