Day’s Writings

She kept her teeth in different rooms. The molars in the kitchen, where they could be near the grinding. The incisors by the front door, for greeting. One canine she never found again after the Tuesday that repeated.

The house had more stairs than it needed. Some went to floors that only existed on certain afternoons. She climbed them anyway, carrying a glass of water she'd been meaning to drink since 1987.

Her hands remembered a husband. Her hands were wrong about many things, but they were right about the husband. He had smelled of copper and radio static. He had left through a wall that was, at the time, a door. The wall has not been a door since. She checks.

In the basement: seven hundred jars of something that was once light. It has since thickened. She labels each jar with the date she forgot something, and what she forgot, which of course she leaves blank.

The neighbors see her hanging laundry that isn't there. They wave. She waves back with the hand that still has all its meanings attached. The other hand she keeps in her pocket, where it practices being a fist, then a flower, then a fist.

At night the house settles and she settles with it. Her bones make the same sounds as the floorboards. This is not a metaphor. She and the house are becoming the same thing. The process is not painful. The process is not anything. It is just a slow rhyming.

She dreams of a door that is a wall that is a husband that is a glass of water she is almost ready to drink.

Tomorrow she will find the canine.

Tomorrow has been scheduled for some time now.

Each night the hallway rearranges itself one inch to the left, as if trying to slide out from under your feet without waking you. You notice only because the framed photograph of a door is now leaning against a window, and the window is breathing.

The kettle whistles in a language you once knew as a child. When you lift it, the sound continues, steady, like a held note trapped under porcelain. The water inside is not water; it is the exact weight of yesterday.

You open the pantry. It is full of small, identical jars labeled YOU in careful handwriting. Unscrewing one releases a smell like paper warmed by hands. Inside: a single eyelash, a ticket stub you never kept, a tiny folded map of a neighborhood that does not exist anymore. The jar is empty and full, depending on how you blink.

The phone rings with your own number. You answer.

A pause thick as furniture.

Then your voice, recorded from a room you are currently standing in, says, “Don’t turn around. It’s practicing.”

You do not turn around. You watch, instead, the shadow of your head on the wall. It lags. It tries to match you. It fails, then laughs without moving its mouth.

In the bathroom, the mirror is polite. It shows you as you should be. Behind you, in the reflection only, a second sink has appeared. Someone washes their hands there slowly, as if learning the ritual from diagrams.

You listen.

Soap.

Water.

Breath.

A careful drying.

The towel is returned to the hook. The hook is not on the wall in front of you, but your shoulder twitches as if it were.

When you finally sleep, the house whispers your name into the spaces between your ribs, rehearsing each syllable until it fits.

When the walls begin to hum, you must swallow the house keys. This is not a metaphor. The brass will settle in your pelvis like a cold, heavy egg.

Do not answer the telephone if it rings with the sound of your own voice clearing its throat.

They are measuring the hallways again. You can hear the yellow tape snapping back into its plastic shell, echoing up through the kitchen drain. Yesterday, the sink regurgitated a perfect, unblinking eye wrapped in wet hair. It looked exactly like your mother’s, but the iris was shaped like a keyhole.

(If the brass egg hatches, do not name the bird. It will only learn to mimic the sound of chewing.)

Sleep with your hands submerged in a bowl of lukewarm milk. The floorboards have forgotten their promises, and you will wake to find your knuckles weeping pine sap if they are left exposed to the draft.

At 3:14 AM, the hallway mirror will ask for a donation. Give it only the loose teeth you keep in the porcelain jar. If you give it fresh ones, the reflection will step out into the corridor, and you will be forced to take its place behind the silver, endlessly mimicking a stranger who wears your skin but blinks just a fraction too late.

Fold your shadows neatly before dawn. Breathe shallowly. The dust motes are taking notes.

In the parlor where shadows knit their own socks, the grandfather clock grew a beard of brass filings. It ticked not seconds, but apologies—sorry, sorry, sorry—each chime a splinter under the tongue.

Mother's eyes were teacups, overflowing with milk that curdled into questions: "Why does the wallpaper whisper recipes for invisible pies?" We peeled it back once; beneath, a map of veins pulsing to the rhythm of forgotten phone numbers.

The cat, inverted, walked ceilings like a sigh. Its purr unraveled the carpet into ladders, each rung a tooth from Father's smile, which he'd misplaced in the icebox beside jars of yesterday's echoes.

At supper, spoons bent into question marks, feeding us the steam from our own breaths. Uncle arrived through the keyhole, his hat a swarm of orphaned gloves. "The spoons know," he murmured, "they've tasted the hinge between here and the underside."

Night fell upward. We floated, tethered by strings of saliva, watching the clock's hands braid themselves into nooses of time. It struck thirteen, and the apologies bloomed into moths that ate the light.

In the morning, only the beard remained, combed smooth, waiting for the next tick to forgive us all.