the dirt room

by Justine Visceglia

It started with a thrum behind the wall. Steady, insistent, like a heartbeat with bad manners. Not mine. I checked. Held a mirror beneath my nose, waited for fog, just in case I had possibly become the kind of ghost who forgets to notice. Not mine.

When the sound didn’t stop, I peeled back the wallpaper. It came away like a scab. Quite dry, reluctant, flaking at the edges, leaving behind skin-pink glue and years old dust.

Behind the wall was a closet. Behind the closet, a mouth.

Not a literal mouth, not lips and gums and dental regrets, but something that pulsed, breathed, remembered. The walls were damp with history. I crawled in. The air tasted like pennies and bruises, and something left too long in the sun. I think I passed through a membrane. It was slick and elastic, like the inside of my cheek that I find myself biting far too often. The light on the other side had teeth. Sharper than mine.

That was the first time I saw the dirt room.

A chair sat in the middle, sculpted from salt. Sharp-edged and flaking like frostbite. Nearby, a mirror made of breath. On the floor, children’s toys arranged in perfect circles: a mechanical dog twitching but never flipping, a cracked Barbie head glancing upward the plastic warped by heat, a disembodied doll hand giving an ironic thumbs-up, fingers frozen mid-gesture, like it died hopeful.

The dirt was soft. Pressing my palm into it, I heard a sigh from below, as if the ground itself needed rest.

I stayed a few hours. Or days. Time folded neatly there, like a napkin at an unspoken dinner.

At one point, I scratched a message into the dirt: If found, please return to reality. But with it, no return address.

Each time that I returned from the dirt room, something was missing on the other side. My toothbrush. A beauty mark near my ribcage. Eventually, even the taste of lemons. No longer bitter. The room seemed to trade pieces of me for access. Small tolls for entry. I didn’t mind. Out there, reality had become brittle. In here, at least the ghosts apologized when they bumped into you.

I told Maya about it one evening as she came home from work.

She said, “Are you on new meds?”

“Sort of,” I said.

She didn’t ask more, but the next morning I found a flashlight and a crucifix keychain on the kitchen island.

“In case your room’s secretly evil,” she said. I liked that she considered both possibilities: hallucination and hell.

We crawled in together. Her jeans tore at the knees, and she bled on the threshold, like an offering.

The dirt room darkened with her presence, as if it were trying to conceal something.

“This place smells like somebody died,” she whispered. “Like their secrets.”

“Thank you,” I said. I thought that was beautiful.

She paced the perimeter, eyes scanning the corners. “Where’s the exit?”

I pointed up. A single red door hovered six feet off the ground. No ladder. No frame. Just a door, floating.

“That’s not how doors work,” she said.

“Nothing here works. That’s the point.”

She nodded and whispered to the mirror. I asked what she said.

“Well, it wasn’t meant for the living,” she replied.

There was a girl once in the dirt room, sitting in the salt chair. She looked like me, but not. Her head turned backwards. Her teeth, piano keys. When I asked who she was, she reached into her chest and pulled out a snow globe.

Inside: my childhood bedroom. But instead of lavender walls…bees.

Sometimes I wake up coughing dirt. Not mud, thankfully, but fine, dry dust that clings to my gums, lines my throat, and settles beneath my fingernails like ash. As though I’ve been whispering into the floorboards of some deeper sleep.

My mother says it’s hormones. She says everything is. Even war. Even grief.

My father says it’s probably the vents. But there are no vents in my room. Just a window. Just a closet with breath.

Last night, the dirt room pulsed.

And not metaphorically.

The ground throbbed beneath me. The chair wept salt. The mirror played a film of me aging backward, shrinking until I disappeared into the blue of my mother’s iris.

I don’t think the dirt room wants me to leave.

And, if I’m honest, there’s a part of me, tracing each soft edge of my unraveling self, that doesn’t want to, either. The world outside is sharp. In here, I can be partial. I can be unfinished. Strange, soft, a little bit tragic. No one tells me to remember hydrate or smile a little more.

Sometimes, Maya still visits. She brings offerings with her: spoons, fingertips.

We don’t speak much anymore. We dig. We haven’t hit the bottom yet.

But I think we’re close.

Photo of Justine Visceglia Quinonez

BIO: Justine Visceglia Quinonez lives in the in-between: a woman stretched across many lives at once. Teacher, writer, yogi, seeker. Her roots are in story, drawn again and again over the course of a decade, to the quiet gravity of fiction and the lyric pull of prose, where time folds and characters bloom with shadows and light. She writes to unearth, to remember, to cast spells of story that linger long after the final word.