Turn 21 of 23

Let them come in. Let them see.

The inspector's voice carries through the glass, thin and fractured, talking to someone on the other end of the phone. Lena watches her lips move and the words arrive like signals from a distant station — shaped by a language she once spoke fluently but that now feels like a coat she wore in another life, cut for a body she doesn't inhabit anymore. The woman is crying. Lena notices this the way she notices the weather: distantly, without response. A tear tracks down a cheek pressed against the window. The phone shakes in a trembling hand. The words "I don't know how long" and "she's not responding" and "the whole room" float through the glass and dissolve in the warm, amber air.

Then the voice changes. Sharper. Directed inward.

"Can you hear me? Can you hear me in there?" The woman is talking to her now, tapping the glass with one knuckle, and Lena's eyes track the motion and her mouth opens and a belch rolls out — low, resonant, polite in its own way, an acknowledgment stripped of everything but the body's native tongue. The woman flinches again and then steadies herself and tries once more.

"My name is Mara. I'm a building inspector. There are people coming. Can you tell me your name?"

Lena stares at her through the glass. The name arrives in her mind and sits there like a stone on the surface of a deep, warm lake — familiar but useless, a label for a woman who no longer exists in any shape the word was designed to contain. Her lips part. Something moves in her throat — not a word, not quite, just a sound, a low vibration that could be the beginning of "Lena" or could be a groan or could be nothing but the hum of the wish translated through vocal cords that haven't formed a sentence in over a decade. Her body rumbles. A fart, long and wet, vibrates the floor beneath her. The inspector's face changes.

They arrive in waves. First the fire department — two men in turnout gear who force the window from outside because the door is a wall of flesh pressed against bowed wood. The window frame shrieks and gives way and the outside air rushes in, cold and clean and aggressive, and Lena's skin prickles with a sensation she hasn't felt in years: temperature that isn't her own. The cold cuts through the haze for a moment — just a moment — and she feels the contrast between the world she has become and the world that has come to find her. Then the haze closes over the gap like water sealing a wound. The firemen climb through the window and stop. They stop the way a person stops at the edge of a cliff, not because they choose to but because the body refuses to go further. One of them says a word Lena doesn't recognize — short, sharp, bitten off — and the other doesn't say anything at all. They are looking at her. They are seeing her. And Lena lets them.

More people. A paramedic. Another voice on a radio. Someone is asking questions — "How long has she been here?" and "Is she conscious?" and "What do we do with —" and the sentence doesn't finish because there is no word for what they are looking at, no protocol for a body that has become a room. A woman in gloves touches Lena's arm and Lena doesn't pull away and doesn't lean in. She simply exists, being touched, the way a mountain exists beneath a hand pressed to its stone. The gloved fingers flinch back from the warmth of her skin, the grease, the texture of flesh that hasn't been washed in years. Someone retches near the window. The smell — her smell, the apartment's smell, the climate she has been breathing for a decade — hits them all at once now that the window is open, and Lena watches their faces contort and feels the same nothing she has felt since the wish took hold. Not shame. Not pride. Just the warmth, and the haze, and the body doing what it does — a belch, a fart, a slow, imperceptible expansion — while strangers stand in the ruins of her isolation and try to find a word for what she has become.