Leo woke up feeling like his head had been stuffed with wet cotton. His nose was a tap he couldn’t quite turn off. But the strangest part, the part that made the world feel like a dream he couldn’t wake from, was his ears.

Not with wax or water, but with that thick, pressurized silence that only a brutal cold can bring. When he sat up, he heard his own pulse as a muffled thump-thump behind his eardrums. The birds outside his window sang into a void. His morning coffee didn’t sizzle when it hit the hot pan; it merely sssked —a whisper of a sound, quickly swallowed.

Around noon, he tried the old trick: pinching his nose and gently blowing. His ears gave a tiny, reluctant pop , and for one glorious second, the world rushed in. The hum of the refrigerator. The drip of the faucet. The patter of rain against the window like a thousand tiny fingers. He gasped at the fullness of it, the sudden noisiness of being alive.

He called in sick. His own voice sounded far away, like a radio playing in another room.