Day’s Writings

You arrive early but the waiting room remembers you arriving late. The magazines are from next month. One of them contains your obituary, which you skim politely, not wanting to seem vain.

The receptionist has the face of everyone you've ever disappointed. She smiles with all of their teeth.

"You can go in now," she says, though you haven't told her your name. You haven't told anyone your name in years. You keep it folded in your wallet behind the photograph of a door.

The hallway is longer than the building. The lights hum a song your mother used to sing before she became a different mother. You pass a window that looks out onto the room you are currently walking through. You wave. You do not wave back.

The doctor's office smells like a color you've never seen. He asks you to describe your symptoms and you open your mouth and a small bird flies out, then another, then a continuous stream of birds, hundreds of them, and the doctor nods and writes something down. "How long has this been going on?" he asks. You say forever and he nods again.

He tells you to count backward from a number that doesn't exist. You begin. Somewhere around the place where seven should be, you feel the room tilt and your bones rearrange into a alphabet you almost recognize.

"The good news," he says, "is that you are not sick."

"The bad news?"

He removes his glasses. Behind them, he has no eyes — just two more, smaller glasses, and behind those, two more, and behind those, a depth that goes back and back and back.

"The bad news is that you were never the patient."

The receptionist smiles again from somewhere inside your chest.

At night the hallway unrolls.

Not opens—unrolls, like paper that remembered it was once a tree. The walls go thin and fibrous. You can see the grain where old conversations grew. Every door has a legend in the corner: YOU ARE HERE, printed in a font that was discontinued for lying.

I follow the carpet’s arrows. They point both ways and apologize.

In the kitchen, the sink is full of small, shining keys, all cut for mouths. When I pick one up it tastes like pennies and someone else’s name. The faucet drips in a steady rhythm: lost / found / lost / found, as if water is trying to decide what it is.

On the refrigerator: magnets spelling DO NOT REMEMBER THE WINDOW.

There is, of course, a window.

It shows the living room from a different angle, slightly later. In it, I stand with my hand raised to wave at myself, but the timing is wrong by one breath. The other me smiles too late, as though reading subtitles.

A knock comes from inside the closet.

I open it and discover a staircase made of folded shirts, each step stitched from the day I didn’t say something. I climb anyway. The fabric gives, sighing. At the top is the attic, which is only a low ceiling and a single bulb that hums my childhood address.

Something crawls along the rafters: not a rat, not a thought—an inventory.

It lists the objects I will lose, one at a time, in the voice of the house.

1. Your shadow (already misfiled).
2. The sound your footsteps make when you’re alone.
3. The last honest photograph.

When the bulb flickers, I see the hallway rolled back up, neatly stored, like a tongue in a mouth that has decided to stop speaking.

The house settles.

Somewhere in its walls, a map is being drawn of me.

It begins when the hallway elongates. You will notice the baseboards softening, taking on the bruised texture of wet gums. Do not touch them. The house is trying to swallow its own architecture.

If the doorbell rings, check the refrigerator. If the milk has separated into water and hair, you must answer the door. The caller will wear your mother's jawline, but their eyes will be drawn in charcoal. Invite them in. Offer them a shallow bowl of dust.

We have found that the easiest way to survive the evening is to fold yourself into a shape the corners cannot recognize. A scalene triangle is best. Breathe only when the walls exhale. You will feel the pulse beneath the carpet—a slow, subterranean thud that aligns with the flickering of the lamps.

Yesterday, the armchair coughed up a memory of a Tuesday you spent in 1994. It smelled of copper and wet wool. Sweep it under the rug before it begins to weep.

Remember: the mirrors are merely terrariums for the things that look like us. If your reflection blinks out of sync, press your thumbs into your eyelids until you see the ocean. The ocean is just a million clicking tongues in the dark.

In the kitchen, the fridge hums a lullaby to the spoons, which quiver in their drawer, dreaming of silver rivers. Mother pours milk that curdles into faces—your face, but with eyes like peeled grapes, staring up from the porcelain.

Father winds the clock at midnight, but its hands reverse, pulling yesterday's regrets through the gears. They slither out as worms, fat and eyeless, coiling around his ankles. "They taste like regret," he says, chewing one slowly.

The mirror in the hall reflects not you, but a version with teeth too many, grinning sideways. It whispers your name backward: Ymaenruoy. Step closer, and it breathes fog onto the glass, drawing stick figures that dance into nooses.

Outside, the streetlamp blinks Morse code: COME HOME COME HOME. But home is the basement where shadows knit sweaters from lost socks, and the washing machine gargles lullabies in reverse.

You sit at the table, eating cereal that swims upstream in your spoon. The flakes spell STAY in milk-letters, dissolving as you blink. The family smiles, mouths full of clockwork teeth.

Tick-tock. The fridge door swings open. Inside, your reflection waves from the vegetable crisper, holding a spoon that drips with tomorrow.