Refractions

Rain pelted against the windows of the lecture hall, creating a drumming backdrop to Professor Nakamura’s monotonous voice. Yuto Tanaka sat in the third row from the back, his notebook open but blank. The same notebook had been empty for weeks now. Around him, students hunched over laptops and tablets, their faces illuminated by blue light, diligently taking notes or secretly browsing the internet. No one noticed Yuto staring at the empty page, his pencil tapping lightly against the margin.

Outside, the Tokyo sky hung low and gray, casting the sprawling university campus in a muted palette. The buildings, modern glass structures interspersed with older brick edifices, looked like they were underwater, distorted by sheets of rain.

“If you examine the economic data from 2013,” Professor Nakamura adjusted his glasses, clicking to the next slide, “you’ll notice a significant correlation between consumer confidence and...”

The professor’s voice began to fade, as if someone was slowly turning down the volume. Yuto blinked, trying to focus on the projected graphs and charts. The lines blurred, numbers swimming across the screen like schools of fish. He rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, the data had transformed into meaningless squiggles.

“Yuto? Are you listening?”

The professor’s voice cut through the fog, but it sounded distant, echoing as if traveling down a long tunnel. Yuto opened his mouth to respond, but the words died in his throat.

The fluorescent lights overhead flickered once, twice.

No. Not here. Not now.

The lecture hall dissolved around him. The steady drumming of rain against the windows transformed into a rhythmic dripping.Plip. Plip. Plip.Not water, something thicker. Something darker.

Yuto wasn’t in the classroom anymore. He stood in a narrow hallway, the walls a sickly institutional green. Blood, viscous and dark, smeared along the corridor in sweeping arcs, as if painted by a frenzied hand. The fluorescent lights above stuttered, casting the scene in strobe-like flashes that made the blood appear black, then crimson, then black again.

His breathing, or was it someone else’s? came in ragged gasps that echoed off the close walls. Each inhale felt like glass in his lungs.

“Yuto...” A voice called his name, but it sounded wrong, layered, as if multiple people were speaking in imperfect unison. “Yuto, come back...”

At the end of the hallway, a figure lay crumpled on the floor. An arm extended toward him, fingers splayed, palm up, pleading. Blood coated the hand like a glove, dripping from the fingertips.

Plip. Plip. Plip.

“Yu...To...” The voice fractured, splintering into discordant whispers. The hand twitched, fingers curling inward like the legs of a dying spider.

Yuto tried to scream, but no sound emerged. He tried to run, but his feet were anchored to the floor. The hallway began to stretch, elongating impossibly, the bloodied figure receding further into the distance through neither of them moved.

Then, abruptly, the world snapped back into focus.

“--if you look at the data from 2013-- Yuto? Are you listening?” Professor Nakamura was staring directly at him, one eyebrow raised in irritation. The lecture hall had returned, the students, teh rain against the windows.

Yuto gasped, a harsh intake of breath that sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet room. Sweat beaded on his forehead, running down his temples. His heart hammered against his ribs as if trying to escape.

Twenty pairs of eyes swiveled in his direction. Some curious, some annoyed, others concerned. Whispers rippled through the room.

“Is he okay?”

“Did he fall asleep?”

“I think he’s having a panic attack.”

“That’s the weird guy from Building C, right?”

Yuto’s hands trembled as he gathered his untouched notebook and backpack. “Sorry,” he mumbled, though he wasn’t sure if anyone heard him. He stood on unsteady legs, the floor seeming to tilt beneath him.

“Yuto, if you’re feeling unwell,” Professor Nakamura began, but Yuto was already stumbling toward the exit, bumping into knees and backpacks as he escaped down the row.

The hallway outside was mercifully empty. Yuto staggered to the nearest bathroom, pushing through the door with more force than necessary. It slammed against the wall, the sound echoing in the tiled space. He lurched toward the sink, gripping the porcelain edge as if it were the only solid thing in a disintegrating world.

Cold water from the tap. Splashed once, twice on his face. The shock of it helped anchor him to reality. Yuto raised his head, meeting his own gaze in the mirror.

For a disorienting moment, he didn’t recognize himself. The face staring back was familiar yet wrong somehow, like a photograph slightly out of focus. Dark circles under bloodshot eyes. Skin too pale. Hair disheveled from running nervous fingers through it too many times.

“Get it together,” he whispered to his reflection. “It’s not real. It’s not real...”

His sleeve had ridden up, exposing his wrist. A thin, red line marred the pale skin there, a fresh scratch, maybe an inch long. Yuto stared at it, brow furrowing.

“When did that...?” He traced the scratch with his finger. He had no memory of injuring himself.

The sharp smell of antiseptic cleaning hung in the air, triggering a wave of inexplicable dread that washed over him, leaving him cold. Something about that smell, it was connected to the hallway, to the blood, to the reaching hand...

His phone buzzed in his pocket. Yuto flinched, then slowly retrieved it. A text from Sora glowed on the screen:

Hey, are you okay? You looked pale in class. Call me if you need to talk.

Yuto’s thumb hovered over the reply button, but what could he say?I just hallucinated a bloody corridor and a dying person calling my name. Also I have a mysterious scratch I don’t remember getting. Normal Tuesday stuff.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket without responding.

Outside, the rain continued unabated. Yuto stood under the overhang of the building, watching students hurry past with umbrellas and raincoats, moving in clusters, laughing and talking despite the weather. They seemed to exist in a different reality than his, one where the ground was solid, where memories could be trusted, where hallucinations didn’t interrupt lectures.

He had two more classes that day, but the thought of sitting in another room, surrounded by people, pretending to be normal, made his chest constrict. Instead, he pulled up his hoodie and stepped out into the rain.

For hours, Yuto wandered the city, letting the rain soak through his clothes. He moved through Shibuya’s crowded streets, past neon signs reflecting in puddles, among throngs of people who looked through him as if he were a ghost. The sensory overload was almost comforting, the cacophony of the city drowning out the whispers in his mind.

As afternoon faded into evening, Yuto found himself taking the familiar route back to his dormitory. Building C was the oldest on campus, a six-story concrete structure with narrow windows and perpetually malfunctioning elevators. His room was on the fourth floor, at the end of a hallway that was always too quiet.

The door to room 408 stuck slightly, requiring a firm push to open. Inside, the small space was exactly as he’d left it that morning: bed unmade, clothes draped over his desk chair, empty instant ramen cups on the windowsill. The walls were bare except for a single photograph hanging crookedly near his bed, Yuto and Sora at their high school graduation, both smiling, Sora’s arm thrown casually around Yuto’s shoulders.

The room felt both like a sanctuary and a prison. The hum of the city was muffled here, replaced by the occasional footsteps from the room above and the persistent drip from the bathroom faucet that maintenance had promised to fix weeks ago.

Yuto shed his wet clothes, changing into dry sweatpants and a t-shirt. His phone had accumulated more notifications: two more texts from Sora, one from his mother, and an email from Professor Nakamura asking if everything was alright.

He opened his mother’s text first, reading her cheerful update about his sister’s piano recital and his father’s promotion. Normal life continuing in Kyoto without him. His thumb hovered over the call button, but he couldn’t bring himself to press it. What would he say? How could he explain what was happening when he didn’t understand it himself?

Instead, he turned off his phone completely and lay down on his bed, staring at the ceiling where water stains formed abstract patterns. The rain against his window created shifting shadows across the room, like phantoms dancing at the edge of his vision.

Sleep felt dangerous tonight, but consciousness wasn’t must safer. Yuto’s thoughts fractured and reformed, pieces of the day replaying in disjointed flashes.

The blood-smeared hallway. The scratched wrist. The voice calling his name.

What if the hallucination wasn’t an hallucination at all? What if it was a memory? Or a premonition?

Worst still, what if there was something broken inside his mind, some fundamental fracture that was allowing reality to slip through the cracks?

As he lay there, a question surfaced from the depths of his consciousness, bringing with it a cold wave of terror:

What if I’m not alone in my own head?

The thought lingered, unanswerable and persistent, as the night deepened around him, and the rain continued its relentless drumming against the glass.