We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

I felt strange. I felt my own ribs, like they were iron rods, and they were in the way, they were actually in the way of my heart, it was too close, there wasn’t enough room. I was standing in front of the glass door with the golden numbers I-330. She was bent over her desk writing something, her back to me.

Through the dark windows of her eyes, there, on the inside, I see the stove burning, sparks, tongues of flames leaping up, piles of dry resinous wood. And I see that

He read it, and I saw a smile slip out of his eyes, slide down his face, and, with a flick of its tail, take a seat on the right side of his mouth.

But I’d covered only half the distance when I found myself up against the sharp, immovable javelins of her eyelashes and stopped.