Day’s Writings

In the house where I grew up, the hallway was longer on Thursdays. My mother never mentioned it. She would just set an extra place at the table — not for a guest, but for the additional walking.

I have compiled a list of things that are almost wrong:

- The sound a mirror makes when no one is in the room.
- Teeth that fit perfectly but belong to a different mouth.
- The moment between deciding to stand and standing, stretched to four minutes.
- Mail addressed to you in your own handwriting, postmarked next week.

My dentist once told me that enamel remembers. I asked him what it remembers. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Not yet."

There is a woman on my street who waters her garden at 3 AM. The flowers are concrete. They are growing.

I keep finding the same sentence in different books: The patient was discharged into a color that doesn't exist yet. I've checked. The books don't contain this sentence when other people read them.

Last November, I fell asleep on a train and woke up in the correct station at the correct time, but the station was facing the other direction. Nobody else seemed troubled. A child was eating an orange, slowly, watching me with the particular patience of someone who has been a child for a very long time.

I called my mother about the hallway. She said, "Which one?"

There is a second hallway.

There has always been a second hallway.

I am standing in it now. The phone is ringing at both ends. The wallpaper is a pattern of mouths, and they are all saying something reasonable that I can't quite hear.

The cashier has no face, only a thumbprint where the mouth should be. You place your basket on the belt: three hours (bruised), a mirror that won’t show you from the front, and a small, polite animal that keeps folding itself into different names.

The belt moves without moving. A red light scans your wrists.

“Do you have membership?” the thumbprint asks, printing a damp O into the air.

You show it your childhood, still sealed in plastic. The seal is intact, but the contents rattle like pills.

“Hmm.” The thumbprint peels a coupon from your shadow. Buy one regret, get one free.

Behind you, the line stretches into a thin corridor of people holding weather. One man cradles a thunderhead against his chest. A woman feeds hailstones to her purse. A child licks an eclipse like a lollipop and shudders with sweetness.

Your items beep in a language you almost remember. The mirror tries to warn you. The animal’s names flutter around your ankles and make your skin itch.

The cashier says, “Paper or plastic?”

You answer, “Envelope.”

It nods, as if this is a normal preference, and slides the sky into a bag. The bag is too small; the corners of blue crumple, the clouds crease, the sun dents like fruit.

“Would you like to donate your extra minutes to those in need?” it asks.

You feel the spare minutes in your pockets, warm and wriggling. You set them on the counter. They crawl toward the register and vanish into the drawer with a sigh.

The receipt prints slowly, on skin.

At the bottom, in faint ink: NO REFUNDS AFTER OPENING.

Outside, you open the bag.

The sky unfolds wrong, like a map to a place that refuses you. Birds fall upward. Your breath becomes someone else’s handwriting. Somewhere a door closes, gently, in your name.

When the second hand begins to bruise, it is time to open the windows. The draft will taste of wet wool and swallowed hair. Breathe it in shallowly. Do not let the dog watch the pendulum; it swings with the heavy, wet drag of a tongue against a palate, and the dog will eventually try to answer.

Yesterday, I found an extra minute coiled in the sink drain. It was pale and blind, contracting when I touched it with a spoon. I sealed it in a mason jar. Because of this, the afternoon is skipping. The kettle boils, the kettle boils, the kettle boils. The water has been gone for days, but the screaming remains.

To rewind the mechanism, you must insert two fingers into the warm aperture beneath the dial. Push past the membrane until you feel the cartilage click. Do not linger. If the thumping inside synchronizes with your own pulse, sever your arm at the elbow. It is already spooling your veins around the mainspring.

Already, my ribs feel hollow, shaved down into chimes. When the hall door opens, I resonate at a frequency that makes the mirrors weep silver.

Please, check the jar. The pale minute is growing joints. It is tapping on the glass, and it wants to know what time it is.

In the butter-smooth hours after midnight, the grandfather clock coughed up a feather. It fluttered down, ink-black and warm, landing on the doily where Grandmother's ghost embroidered her regrets. She stitched loops of spider-silk into the air, whispering recipes for invisible pies—fillings of regret, crusts of forgotten names.

Upstairs, the mirror in the hall reflected not faces, but the undersides of clouds: bruised plums leaking milk. I leaned in, and my teeth multiplied, spilling like dice across the floorboards. They chattered secrets: The wallpaper breathes. It hungers for patterns it can't peel.

Outside, the streetlamp nursed a single moth, its wings pinned like a specimen under glass. The moth hummed a lullaby in reverse, unraveling the night's seams. Threads of shadow pooled at my feet, forming puddles that tasted of rust and half-remembered phone numbers.

I dialed the dial tone. It answered in my father's voice: "The soup is ready, but the spoons have teeth."

Dawn arrived sideways, slipping through the keyhole as a parade of eyeless goldfish. They flopped across the rug, gasping alphabets no one could read. The clock struck thirteen, and the feather ignited—smoke curling into the shape of a question mark, hanging there, waiting for an answer that never comes.