From The Belly by Lucy Siegel

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The room smelled faintly of peppermint oil and a church that had been swallowed by a lung. Forty, maybe forty-three of them lay on mats, mouths open, sucking air like baby birds. Just waking to the world, breathing for the very first time.

The teacher paced between their bodies, a quiet current among them, softly weaving instructions into the bodies that already breathed - inviting each breath to deepen, unfold, become something more vivid than mere survival, murmuring gentle commands to lungs that already knew how to breathe - calling forth breaths to bloom beyond the unseen, to pulse with the undulation of becoming in a tone that was equal parts lullaby and threat. The out breath just a beat longer than the in. Each line of air scratched the inside of her throat, dry like a page left in the sun too long. At the top of the breath, she held. Lungs tight as fists, chest an iron bell that wouldn’t ring. There
was a squeak caught at the back of her throat - a mouse of a sound too afraid to grow teeth. Only a shallow swallow could keep it at bay.

A twitch, a tingling. Eyes wet. Beneath her, something ancient pounded a drum in the floorboards. Suddenly she felt mildly seasick. The squeak wasn’t hers, not at first. She thought it was a shoe sole on the hardwood, or the wheeze of her neighbor. The neighbor had that "I swear I’m fine" look people get when their lungs sound like bubble wrap and their soul is three breaths from foreclosure. But no - no one wore shoes. Not even socks. Bare feet, skeleton-like, 430 vulnerable digits if she had to guess. She once counted her own toes twice to make sure she was symmetrical, so she’s qualified. The sound was coming from inside her, from the crawlspace between her ribs where dust motes of memory had been breeding in the dark.

With every inhale, the squeak grew teeth. It pinged the cartilage, tested the hinges of her jaw. It was impatient. It had been rehearsing for years for this exit. To an end unknown. Around her, other bodies were breaking open in ordinary ways - soft moans, hiccuping sobs, a woman in the back row whispering sorry over and over and over. Her squeak wanted nothing to do with them. It wanted columns. Bridges. Arches.

She swallowed, and felt it rearranging the furniture of her throat, hanging curtains in her windpipe, hammering a nail into her uvula for structural support. Frankly, a bit of an overachiever for something that had been living rent-free between her ribs. She thought of all the times she swallowed the howl. All the times she sipped sorrow like tea, chewed the scream into a smile, tucked it into soft tissue, until the body forgot who it was before silence.

She whispered to herself, why the fuck am I so afraid to scream? Is it the sound of it - too wild, too wounded, too woman? Is it the cracking open of truth, the way a voice can splinter into something unrecognizable, raw, messy, real? Maybe it’s because she knew, deep down, that once she screamed, she wouldn’t be able to lie to herself again. That she would wake something she’d kept sleeping in the bones - grief or rage or god.

The teacher said, “If sound comes, let it come. In any shape it’s begging to take.” And the squeak took that as permission. She had to be told that it was okay now. She may release. She may be a creature. She may shatter clean and finally break. Not from pain, but from the long-held ache of asking permission to be loud.

It shot out of her mouth shaking like a deer on new legs, like a scaffold unrolling, a gleaming framework made of pure resonance. It had mass. Gravity. The woman beside her brushed against it and flinched, as if she’d touched the bare ribcage of a cathedral mid-construction. And with her scream, something left her that was never hers to begin with, never hers to carry.

More sounds erupted from the others - not cries, but beams, buttresses, a spiral staircase of vibration twisting up to the ceiling. She realized they weren’t releasing emotions at all. They were building something together. And somewhere above them, invisible but unmistakable, a roof was forming.

The roof arched overhead, not solid exactly, but undeniable - like the way heat bends light above asphalt. It shimmered in their peripheral vision, but when she looked straight at it, it pretended to be nothing at all.

She wondered what would happen if they all screamed at the same time, in unison. From the marrow-deep grief they’ve buttoned beneath their ribs. Would the ground split? Would the sky listen? Would the oceans pause, confused by a wave they did not create? Would someone, something, echo their screams back to them in their untrained, unfiltered, uncontained being?

She breathed again, and her squeak extended a balcony. Someone else’s low hum set stained-glass panels swinging into place - except the glass was made of his breath condensed into colors that had never been named.

Would their mothers hear it, and feel the unclenching in their jaws from sounds they never heard? Would their daughters wake, not from nightmares but from the myth that being quiet makes us safe?

A man in the front row coughed and accidentally built a gargoyle. It perched over them, eyes made of hot vowels, scanning the room for lies.

The teacher didn’t seem surprised. In fact, she had stopped pacing. She stood at the center, head tilted back, as if she’d been waiting for the architecture all along.

If they all screamed at the same time, would language break? Would silence become holy again, earned instead of imposed?

“This is what they don’t want you to know,” she said, her voice hitting the walls and blooming into ivy. “This is why we are told to be quiet - because every sound we swallow could be a roof, a bridge, a whole new city in the air.”

The gargoyle shivered, flexing its wings. She swore it made eye contact with her, and in the tiniest tilt of its head she understood: the structure wasn’t neutral. It remembered the hands - well, throats - that made it. It owed allegiance only to those who had breathed it into being.

The room was humid with effort now, everyone breathing like they’d just remembered oxygen was a finite, negotiable thing. She could feel the framework knitting tighter above them, growing bolder, hungrier.

“Keep going,” the teacher whispered. “We’re almost past the point where they can dismantle it.”

She didn’t know who they were, but she did know her squeak had ambitions. It was already unfurling a spiral ramp toward a skylight that wasn’t there a moment ago. It wanted to touch the clouds, maybe rewrite the weather, maybe scoop out the sky and replace it with something that hummed.

Someone’s breath formed a door. Someone else’s laughter made the hinges. Luckily, no one’s sarcasm showed up to install a trapdoor. The gargoyle hopped down and sat in the doorway, guarding it like it had been born for this job.

She didn’t know if they were making a sanctuary or a weapon. She only knew she couldn’t stop.

The roof reached its limit and did what all roofs eventually dream of doing: it began to grow legs. Not legs in the biological sense - more like stilts made of pressure and vibration, sound hardened into struts that pressed through the studio floor and into the ground beneath. They could feel the thrum in their tailbones as the whole thing began to walk.

The walls of the studio didn’t stop it. Why would they? Plaster and wood meant nothing to something born from the lungs. It stepped into the street like it had been there for centuries, and the city reacted as if it had been expecting it. Streetlights bent toward the sound-structure, their bulbs blooming into bell-shaped flowers that rang faint chimes. Pigeons spiraled around its gargoyle, catching drafts of resonance like invisible thermals.

Pedestrians froze. Some clutched their bags tighter. Others just stared upward, as if recognizing a word they’d forgotten they knew. The gargoyle hissed at anyone who tried to approach without breathing in time to the group’s rhythm.

Her squeak - no, her column now - kept rising, twisting like DNA toward the cloudline. She could feel it pulling something from her chest she didn’t remember agreeing to give. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it left her lighter, porous.

The teacher’s voice cut through the air like a trowel through wet clay: “Don’t let them label it. Once they name it, they’ll own it. Keep breathing.”

And they did. They breathed until the stoplights lost their colors and began blinking in entirely new shades. They breathed until shop windows melted into pools of glass, then resolidified into mirrors that reflected not the people passing by, but their potential selves. They breathed until the sound-structure’s shadow stretched three neighborhoods wide, covering the city like an unspoken
promise.

She didn’t know where they were going. She didn’t know if the thing they’d made was a revolution, a refuge, or a mistake. She only knew that if she stopped breathing, the architecture would collapse, and she’d be left standing in the rubble of the silence she’d once thought was safety. So she inhaled. Twice. Exhaled once. The gargoyle leapt ahead to clear the path. And the city, slowly, began to follow.

The scream. A clearing. A crack where light gets in. A knowing. A tether back to god knows what. She wondered, if they all screamed together, faced dewy, salty, would they finally know what it felt like to contain beautiful chaos, to contain multitudes?

By the end of class, the structure was no longer just a structure. It had grown alcoves where people could slip inside and breathe with them, no questions asked. It had grown balconies that leaned out over intersections to whisper invitations to strangers in traffic. It had grown a library without books - just shelves of bottled exhales, each labeled with a date and a name no one claimed.

The city had started calling it The Lung. Not in the news - those refused to acknowledge it - but in the murmured conversations of night-shift workers, in the breathless gossip of children who chased its shadow down alleys. But The Lung was tired. She could feel it in the rhythm, the way the inhales came slower, the exhalations rattled like rusted bells. The group had shrunk from dozens to a handful, their faces hollow with the cost of constant creation. Even the gargoyle sat slumped at the prow, stone wings twitching in half-hearted beats.

The Lung stopped walking. It turned its great stilts toward them, lowering its balconies like outstretched hands. No words, just that deep, resonant stillness: Choose.

They could keep breathing, keep feeding it until it reached whatever horizon it was seeking, but at the cost of every last scrap of their voices, their warmth, their selves. Or they could stop now, let the sound loosen into air, and watch it collapse into nothing - knowing the city would go back to pretending it had never existed.

 

The teacher’s eyes gleamed in the fading light. “This is the work,” she said. “Knowing when to build, and when to let go.”

Her lungs ached. Her ribs felt like open doors. She thought of the silence she used to live in - the safe, dead air that had held her for years - and how different this silence would be, if she chose it now. She inhaled once, long and slow. Held it. Then released - not a squeak, not a roar, but something in between, a note that wavered like the edge of a decision. The Lung shuddered. The balconies folded inward. The gargoyle leapt, dissolved into dust midair. And the sound - millions of breaths’ worth - lifted from the stilts like a flock breaking from a tree, scattering into the sky.

For a moment, the city looked up. And even when they looked away, some part of them kept listening. She retraced her steps back to the studio, air still trembling in her chest like it had somewhere to be. The Lung stood erect, hovering with the social awkwardness of a chandelier in the wrong room.

Nobody seemed to notice it except the teacher, who gave the thing a polite nod, like she would to a regular who always comes in, never signs in, and still uses the good bolsters to support his knees.

It lingered there, filling the rafters, shedding faint chimes and the occasional draft that smelled like rain in a place she’d never been. She lay back down, letting it loom overhead, wondering if she should start paying it rent, or at least offer it tea.