Day’s Writings

She keeps her teeth in different rooms. The molars in the kitchen, where they chatter against the porcelain when the refrigerator hums too low. The canines she buried under the porch in 1987, though they've since grown into something architectural.

Her husband doesn't notice. Her husband has been reading the same paragraph since October. Sometimes he laughs at it. Sometimes he underlines a word that wasn't there before.

The house is correct. That's the problem. Every angle is precisely 90 degrees, which shouldn't unsettle the surveyor as much as it does. He measures twice. He measures again. He puts down his instruments and asks Mrs. Loom if she's ever heard the house breathe, and she offers him a glass of milk that tastes like the color of a room he slept in as a child.

She is cataloging. That's what she calls it. She catalogs the weight of shadows at different hours. She catalogs the sound a mirror makes when no one is looking into it. She has fourteen notebooks filled with the word almost.

Her daughter calls on Sundays. The phone rings in a pitch that doesn't exist on any scale. Mrs. Loom answers by holding the receiver to the wall, and the wall answers for her, and the daughter says yes, that's what I thought, and hangs up.

Last Tuesday the mailman delivered a package addressed to the house itself. Mrs. Loom signed for it with a name she doesn't remember learning. Inside: a smaller house, identical, and inside that, a woman cataloging, and inside her, a sound like every door in the world closing softly, one after another, in a sequence that, if you listened long enough, would spell something true and irreversible.

She hasn't opened it yet.

She opens it every night.

The first time the hallway breathes, you mistake it for the radiator.

Later, you learn the building has an extra lung wedged between floors three and four. It inflates when you forget names. It deflates when you lie and say you’re fine.

On the door of Apartment 3B there is a peephole, but it looks inward. If you lean close, you can see your own eye already waiting on the other side, patient as a button.

A list is taped beside the mailboxes, written in careful block letters:

1. Do not feed the intercom after midnight.
2. If the elevator arrives empty, do not enter. It is full.
3. If you hear your key turning when your hands are occupied, thank it.

Underneath, a note in different handwriting: we used to have more rules. it ate the paper.

In your kitchen, the refrigerator hums like a distant crowd. Sometimes it says your name the way a stranger says it—too much tongue, not enough permission. When you open the door, the light inside is warm, as if it has been practicing.

There are shelves, yes. There are jars. There is also a small, clean, unlabelled drawer that was not there yesterday. You pull it.

Inside: your childhood tooth in a matchbox, the receipt from a restaurant you never entered, a photograph of you asleep taken from above.

The refrigerator’s motor stutters, then steadies.

You close the drawer. You close the door. You keep your hand on the handle, because you can feel something on the other side doing the same.

In the night, the building exhales your dreams into the vents.

In the morning, your calendar is filled in with appointments you don’t remember making:

—Return borrowed shadow.
—Practice smiling with fewer teeth.
—Bring the hallway something small that used to be yours.

When you step outside, the air tastes briefly of metal and milk. The sun is where it should be, but it watches like an appliance: obedient, quiet, and newly turned on.

Appendage (n.)
What you brush against when washing dishes in the dark water. It has no knuckles, but it perfectly mimics your pulse. Do not pull the drain plug; it is afraid of the dark.

Breath (n.)
The draft exhaled from the electrical outlets. It smells of copper and damp soil. It stutters when you unplug the television.

Carpet (n.)
A porous membrane. Every third Tuesday, you must pour a saucer of whole milk directly into the fibers. If you forget, the floorboards will begin to click like hungry mandibles.

Mother (n.)
The tall standing lamp when you take off your glasses. She is made entirely of brass and static. She is knitting something out of the room's dust. She is very proud of you.

Window (n.)
A painted eyelid. It shows you the street, but the street is a photograph from 1984. The yellow car at the curb never moves. If you tap the glass twice, the driver slowly turns his head.

Yesterday (n.)
A hallway you cannot walk down because the drywall has healed over the doorframe.

In the kitchen, the fridge hums a lullaby from the war, its door ajar like a yawn revealing shelves of milk that stares back. You pour it into your bowl of yesterday's regrets, and it curdles into tiny faces, whispering your childhood phone number.

Upstairs, the grandfather clock chews on hours. Its hands are molars, grinding 3:14 into paste. Tick-tock becomes crunch-squelch. You climb the stairs on all fours, your shadow peeling off the banister like sunburnt skin, fleeing ahead to hide in the attic.

There, your reflection waits in the mirror that isn't a mirror. It has your eyes but mouths sewn with fishing line, leaking syllables of a language birds forgot. "Feed me the time," it mouths, and you offer your wrist. The clock's tongue laps at your pulse, savoring the seconds as they drip.

Downstairs, the milk faces multiply, chanting your name in reverse. The fridge door swings shut, trapping your shadow inside. You hear it clawing, muffled pleas from the vegetable crisper.

Morning never comes. The clock belches noon, and your skin tastes like rust.