Lian the Transformer

The school felt different in the late afternoon, long after the final bell. Empty lockers lined the hall like forgotten voices. Lian moved through them slowly, his fingers trailing the cool metal, as if waiting for something to speak back.

He wasn't looking for anything in particular. Just walking. His sketchbook stayed in his backpack today.

Outside, rain tapped at the windows in quiet rhythms, the kind that made everything feel older, like time was moving sideways instead of forward.

In the science wing, he paused.

A janitor's cart sat unattended in the middle of the hallway. A mop leaned precariously against it, a towel draped over the handle. Mr. Levine was probably nearby—but there were no footsteps, no clatter. Just the low hum of the building breathing.

A crumpled paper lay near the lockers. Lian bent to pick it up—an old math quiz, someone else's scribbles on the back. A dragon doodle. Two stick figures fencing. A note: "Don't forget, test Thursday."

Lian folded it again, tighter, and slipped it into his pocket.

He sat on the floor and stared down the corridor. For a moment, he imagined what it would be like if the world stayed like this forever—quiet, half-lit, expectant. As if something were about to arrive, but hadn't yet decided whether to enter.

The silence let thoughts come.

Not words, exactly. Just feelings. Images. His mother, sitting at the table peeling an orange, her fingers careful not to break the rind. Jamie's voice as she read aloud in class, confident but with a softness that sometimes got lost when others weren't listening. The boy with the headphones, eating quietly beside him.

No animals. No shifting shapes.

Just people.

He didn't feel the need to name any of them today.

Later that night, he walked home slower than usual. The rain had stopped, leaving puddles that caught reflections in strange ways—half real, half stretched. Streetlights turned the sidewalk gold. A cat watched him from under a parked car, its eyes flashing, then vanishing.

He passed a house with music playing faintly inside. Not a song he knew, but something soft and slow. He imagined dancing—not himself, but maybe his mother, in another time, another country. Alone in her room, her arms out, pretending not to be lonely.

At home, she was already asleep. The apartment was dim, warm with leftover steam from the bathroom. His father hadn't come by.

Lian didn't check his phone.

He sat at the kitchen table and opened his sketchbook—not to draw, but to turn the pages, feel the weight of what he had made.

He stopped at a blank page. Stared at it. Closed the book.

Then he reached for the folded paper in his pocket and smoothed it out flat on the table. The dragon sketch stared back at him.

He added a small line under it. Just a scratch, really. But it changed the angle. Now it looked like the dragon was smiling.

He smiled, too. Not big. Just enough.

In the hallway, something creaked. He didn't turn around.

He let the sound pass.