Anatomy of a Rattling breath

Dylan awoke to the sound of his own body betraying him.

It started as a distant thunder—a low, arrhythmic pounding in his chest—before sharpening into a cacophony. His heart thrashed against his ribs like a bird trapped in a chimney flue. His lungs burned, raw and scorched, as if he'd inhaled lit gasoline. The room tilted, darkness pooling at the edges of his vision, and for a dizzying moment, he wondered if this was how it ended: alone, in a twin bed with sweat-soaked sheets, in a creaking farmhouse on the outskirts of a town everyone else had forgotten.

*Not yet,* he pleaded silently, though to whom, he didn't know. God? The universe? The crumbling ceiling above him? His fingers clawed at the nightstand, knocking over an empty water glass. The pills—where were the pills? His trembling hand groped blindly until it closed around the orange plastic bottle. **Prednisone**. The label was frayed at the edges, the prescription refilled too many times. *Take once daily with food. May cause dizziness, nausea, insomnia.* The side effects were a grocery list of horrors, but without it, his lungs would turn to stone.

He dry-swallowed two tablets, the bitter chalk coating his throat. Bile rose, hot and acidic, but he forced it down. The floorboards creaked as he stood, his bare feet shuffling across cold wood. Every step was a negotiation. *Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out.* The mantra had become as routine as blinking. Downstairs, the kitchen faucet dripped a metronome counting down the seconds between relief and collapse.

He didn't turn on the lights. Aunt Marla slept fitfully these days, her worries etched into the couch cushions where she'd nod off watching late-night infomercials. She'd taken him in two years ago, after the first major attack. *"You're family,"* she'd said, though Dylan knew the truth: he was a ghost haunting her already overcrowded life. A sickly nephew with a malfunctioning respiratory system, a walking reminder of her late sister's bad choices. Now, he moved like a thief in his own home, gripping the banister to steady himself.

The kitchen was a relic of the 1970s—avocado-green appliances, linoleum cracked like desert soil. He filled a glass with tap water, his reflection warping in the dim moonlight. At sixteen, he looked both ancient and childlike: sunken cheeks, eyes ringed with the bruised purple of chronic fatigue, hair a tangled mess of black curls. The Prednisone had bloated his face, a cruel joke that made him resemble the boy he'd been before the sickness. Before the coughing fits, the sleepless nights, the way strangers stared at his oxygen tank in the grocery store.

He sank into a chair, the glass trembling in his hand. Outside, the fields stretched into nothingness, the silhouette of Novagen's half-built facility jagged against the horizon. Dylan hated that view. The old textile mill had been a ruin, yes, but it was *their* ruin. Now, it was a skeleton of steel girders and construction lights, a beacon of everything Clairborne wasn't modern, sterile, *alien*. Aunt Marla had ranted about it for weeks. *"Corporate vampires,"* she'd called the Novagen suits. *"Sucking us dry and leaving the husk."*

Dylan didn't care about corporate vampires. He cared about the way the construction dust coated his windowsill, the way his throat itched after the bulldozers rumbled past. He cared about the protestors, kids from the high school, mostly who'd started gathering at the site with signs and slogans. Last week, he'd recognized the red-haired girl who worked the diner's graveyard shift. She'd looked at him with pity when he shuffled in for his nightly coffee, as if his frailty were contagious.

The Prednisone began its slow crawl through his veins. His breathing eased, the vise around his chest loosening. He pulled his knees to his chest, a habit left over from childhood, and stared at the pill bottle. *"Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease,"* the doctor had said. A fancy term for *your lungs are disintegrating*. He'd been twelve, a varsity track star, when the first attack hit mid-race. By thirteen, he'd traded sprinting medals for inhalers. Now, even the walk to the mailbox left him winded.

A floorboard groaned overhead. Dylan froze, guilt souring his tongue. Aunt Marla's footsteps padded down the stairs slow, heavy, weary. She appeared in the doorway, her hair a silver nest, her flannel robe hanging loose.

"Again?" she asked, her voice graveled with sleep.

"I'm fine," he lied.

"Bullshit." She moved to the stove, clattering the kettle onto a burner. "You don't gotta hide it, y'know. I ain't gonna coddle you, but I ain't gonna pretend neither."

Dylan said nothing. The predawn light painted her profile in blues and grays. Marla had her brother's eyes the same sharp hazel but where Dylan's father had been all regrets and ambitions, Marla was considerate, persistent and soft at the same time. She'd fought the Novagen deal tooth and nail, rallying the town council, picketing the construction site. *"They'll promise jobs and leave us with a Superfund site,"* she'd warned. No one listened. Claireborne was drowning, and Novagen was the only life raft.

She slid a mug of peppermint tea across the table. "You see the news? Novagen's CEO gave some speech in Nashville. Called us a 'model for rural revitalization.'" She spat the words like poison.

Dylan sipped the tea, the heat searing his raw throat. "Maybe he's not all bad."

Marla's laugh was a bark. "Men like him are *always* bad. They don't build empires they grave-rob 'em." She nodded at his pill bottle. "How many you take tonight?"

"Two."

"Doctor said one."

"Doctor isn't the one gasping like a fish."

She studied him, her gaze unflinching. For a heartbeat, he saw his mother in her—the same furrowed brow, the same quiet fury at a world that kept taking. Then she stood, her chair scraping the floor. "I'm callin' Doc Pritchett tomorrow. We'll up the dosage proper."

"No." The word came out sharper than he intended. "No more tests. No more scans. I'm *tired*, Aunt Marla."

Tired of the hospital bills. Tired of the pitying looks. Tired of pretending the Prednisone wasn't just a stopgap on a road that dead-ended at a cemetery.

She opened her mouth to argue, to comfort, he wasn't sure but a sudden fit of coughing doubled him over. It ripped through him, violent and wet, his body convulsing as if trying to expel his very organs. Marla was beside him in an instant, her hand steady on his back.

"Breathe," she ordered. "C'mon, kid. *Breathe.*"

When the attack passed, his mouth tasted of copper. He swiped his sleeve across his lips; the fabric came away streaked with pink. Marla paled but said nothing. They'd played this scene too many times.

---

By morning, the Novagen site was swarming with workers. Dylan watched from his bedroom window as cranes swung steel beams into place, their shadows slicing the dawn. His chest still ached, a dull fire smoldering beneath his sternum. The Prednisone had dulled the edge, but it couldn't fix the rot.

Aunt Marla left at sunrise, muttering about "damage control" at the town hall. Dylan knew she'd spend the day drafting petitions, harassing county commissioners, fighting a war she'd already lost. He envied her stubbornness.

He dressed slowly jeans, a threadbare hoodie, boots laced loose to accommodate swollen ankles—and stepped onto the porch. The air was crisp, laced with woodsmoke and diesel. In the distance, the red-haired protestor stood at the chain-link fence, her voice carrying on the wind.

"You're killing us!" she shouted at a hard-hatted foreman. "Your filters don't work! The runoff's already in the creek!"

The foreman shrugged. "Take it up with corporate."

Dylan's fingers tightened around his inhaler. He thought of the creek where he'd fished as a kid, its waters now cloudy and reeking of chemicals. Thought of the Prednisone bottle, nearly empty. Thought of the CEO, whoever he was sipping champagne in some glass tower, untouchable.

A cough bubbled in his chest. He pressed the inhaler to his lips, the aerosol bitter on his tongue. *Albuterol*, the label read. *For bronchospasm relief.* Another stopgap. Another lie.

As he turned to go inside, the red-haired girl caught his eye. She raised a fist in solidarity, her face fierce beneath a spray of freckles. Dylan looked away, shame heating his neck. He wasn't a fighter. He was a ghost, a boy made of pills and phlegm and half-drawn breaths.

But as the construction drones buzzed overhead, their cameras mapping Claireborne for some distant boardroom, Dylan wondered if ghosts could haunt corporations.