short fiction · 2026-10-28

Infrasound at the Reservoir

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The water didn't ripple. That was the first thing Mara noticed — how the surface held its glass-skin stillness while something moved beneath it, a pressure wave too low for ears but not for the body. Her ribs remembered it first: a slow thrumming that made her breath catch in ways that had nothing to do with cold.

She'd come to the old reservoir to record the wind in the pines, the creak of the dam's spillway, the ordinary sounds that filled her field notebooks. The equipment sat in its case, untouched. The meters on the infrasound detector — borrowed from the university's geophysics lab — had climbed past 120 decibels at 14 hertz and kept climbing.

Fourteen hertz. The resonant frequency of the human eyeball, she'd read once. Of the chest cavity. Of the ventricles of the heart.

The water didn't ripple. But the pine needles trembled in a wind she couldn't feel, and somewhere in the dam's concrete guts, a hairline fracture she couldn't see was singing.