Day’s Writings

You arrive early, which is the first mistake. The waiting room remembers you from a visit you haven't made yet. Magazines on the table are addressed to your name, every one of them, and they contain only photographs of a door you recognize but cannot place.

The receptionist smiles with the wrong number of intentions.

"You're expected," she says. "You've always been expected."

Behind her, a clock runs correctly in a direction you can't argue with but know is false. You sit. The chair is warm from you. The other patients look up with your face — not wearing it, not exactly, but oriented toward it, the way sunflowers orient toward light. Their mouths move in a pattern you almost recognize as your childhood phone number.

When your name is called, it is spelled differently but you stand anyway. You stand because your knees stand. You walk because the hallway walks.

The doctor's office smells like the color of your mother's voice. He asks you to describe your symptoms and you open your mouth and a small, perfect house falls out — clapboard, white, with one window lit. He places it on his desk beside eleven others. They are all the same house. He nods like this confirms something.

"You'll need to come back," he says, writing on a prescription pad. The prescription reads: Return to the waiting room. Arrive early. This is the first mistake.

You take it. You thank him. You walk back through a hallway that is longer now by exactly one life. The receptionist doesn't look up.

In the parking lot, your car is running. You are already inside it. You watch yourself leave.

You go back in.

The chair is warm from you.

At 03:17 the hallway clock practiced a new language, clicking its teeth against the dark. I woke with a paperclip in my mouth and the taste of someone else’s birthday.

On the kitchen table: a receipt for one silence, paid in full. The cashier’s signature was my own handwriting, but older—my letters had learned to limp.

I phoned the number printed at the bottom. A voice answered like a towel pressed to glass.

“Thank you for calling the Department of Small Returns,” it said. “Are you calling about your missing seconds?”

“I don’t think I’m missing any.”

A pause. I heard pages being turned far away, wet and careful.

“We have you down for thirty-seven,” the voice said. “The ones you dropped between saying I’m fine and meaning it.”

I opened the freezer. A little bag of frost stared back, labeled: DO NOT THAW. WILL REMEMBER.

In the sink, the tap dripped in syllables. The water tried to become a sentence but could only manage commas.

I checked my pockets. There was a tiny envelope, sealed with skin. Inside: a strand of hair, a key that fit no door, and a note written on the inside of my eyelid.

Your appointment is in the mirror. Come alone. Bring your name, unwrapped.

I went to the bathroom.

My reflection wasn’t there. In its place: the room behind me, empty except for a chair facing the mirror, and someone sitting in it, back turned, wearing my shoulders like an overcoat.

They spoke without moving.

“Please state your full name,” they said, “for the record.”

I opened my mouth.

The hallway clock laughed, softly, in its new language.

The paperclip in my mouth began to straighten.

Do not look directly at the corners of the ceiling. The angles are softening. Yesterday, the plaster breathed out—a slow, damp sigh that smelled of copper and old milk. If it sags further, we will have to harvest the room.

When the telephone rings, press your ear to the receiver but do not speak. The voice on the other end is simply the sound of wet paper tearing. It is counting your eyelashes. If the number is odd, you may carefully hang up. If the number is even, you must swallow the dial tone.

We have asked you repeatedly to stop leaving your shadows folded in the dresser drawers. They are suffocating the linens. The pillowcases have begun to whimper in the night, and the moths are learning to mimic our grief.

To properly boil water, you must first convince the stove that it is wounded. Stroke the porcelain until it flushes dull red. When the water screams, it is ready. Pour it over the tea leaves and watch them uncurl into tiny, drowned hands. Drink before the fingers can interlock.

Your mother stopped by. She left her jawbone on the mantelpiece again. Please mail it back to her in a padded envelope; she is having trouble chewing the daylight, and the sun is getting stuck in her throat.

The wallpaper breathed. Not with lungs, but with the slow pulse of forgotten conversations trapped in its floral curls. I pressed my ear to a rosebud, and it whispered: "You are the wallpaper. Peel yourself."

In the kitchen, spoons stirred themselves in empty cups, tracing spirals that matched the drain's eternal whirl. The milk curdled into faces—my mother's, smiling without teeth. "Drink," it gurgled. I did, and my tongue grew thorns.

Upstairs, the clock ticked backward, hands fleeing to noon. Shadows pooled in corners, forming alphabets of ink that spelled my name in reverse: YAM SI. They slithered across the floor, tasting my ankles with cold, wet tips.

The mirror showed me sideways, ribs unfolding like paper fans into wings of newsprint. Headlines screamed futures I hadn't lived: "Man Devours Own Echo." I reached in; my fingers emerged holding a key made of bone.

Outside, the sky hung low, a vast eyelid blinking streetlamps into existence. Birds flew upward into clouds that rained teeth—small, milk ones, clattering on the roof like applause.

I sat at the table, writing this on my arm with a pen that bled. The words wriggled, rewriting themselves: "Stop reading. You are the page."

Now the wallpaper laughs. Softly. From inside my skin.