Day’s Writings

You arrive early, as instructed. The waiting room is full of you. Not copies — each one is distinct, wearing different years of your face. One of you is crying. One of you is knitting something that moves.

The receptionist calls a name that isn't yours but your legs stand up anyway.

The hallway is longer than the building. The fluorescent lights hum a song you almost remember from a dream you haven't had yet. Doors on both sides, all slightly ajar, all exhaling warm bread-smell.

The doctor's office contains no doctor. There is a chair facing a window. Outside the window is a field you recognize from childhood, except the grass is breathing — slow, deliberate expansions — and there is a horse standing at the far edge made entirely of the color red. Not a red horse. The color itself, standing in the shape of a horse, looking at you.

On the desk: a file with your name, and inside the file, a single page.

The page reads: You have been referred to us by your recurring dream of February 11th. We regret to inform you that the results are you. The you sitting here is the result. We recommend continued existence at the current dosage. Avoid mirrors on Tuesdays. Do not ask the horse what it remembers.

You look up. The horse is closer now. The field is closer. The window is open and you can feel the grass breathing against your ankles though you are on the third floor.

The receptionist knocks and enters carrying a glass of water.

"You'll want to drink this before," she says.

"Before what?"

She checks her clipboard. She frowns. She looks at you with an expression you would describe, if pressed, as tender.

"Before you remember."

1. Before dawn, place your name in a glass of water. Do not drink. Let the letters loosen and swim like tired insects.

2. Listen: the house is practicing your voice in another room. It gets the pauses wrong. It always says yes too early.

3. Peel the wallpaper where the light looks thinner. Beneath it you will find a second wallpaper, identical, except the flowers are watching you back. Apologize. Continue peeling until the wall admits it is only a rumor.

4. The mirror is full of weather. Hold your face up to it like a document and wait for approval. If the glass fogs, it means you are still alive in the ordinary way. If it clears, you are alive in the other.

5. There is a corridor behind your left ear. Walk it. The carpet is made of baby teeth; it does not bite, but it remembers. At the end, a clerk with your hands will ask for identification. Offer him your most recent dream. He will stamp it with a sound you will hear later as thunder.

6. Do not look directly at the family photographs. Their pupils have become doorways. If you glance too long, you will feel yourself being filed away.

7. At noon, the clock will cough up a small black key. Swallow it. You will taste iron and childhood. This is normal.

8. In the evening, open your mouth and speak your face into existence: cheekbone, eyelid, freckle, the scar you forgot you earned. Each word will land on you like wet paper.

9. When your face finally returns, it will not fit. It will sit a millimeter above the skin, humming. That is acceptable. The gap is where the future breathes.

10. Sleep with your eyes open. The darkness will come closer, curious, and whisper: Now you look like someone who can be found.

When the gums recede from the baseboards, it is time to water the hallway. Do not use milk. Milk encourages the hinges to weep. Instead, sweep the static that flakes from the television into a shallow bowl. You will hear a low, wet hum from the plaster. This is normal.

Step lightly over the rug. It has been digesting Tuesday since tomorrow.

If the doorbell rings, check the mirrors before answering. If your reflection is facing away from you, do not open the door. The caller is only a composite of your discarded hair, asking to be let back into your scalp.

Keep the windows latched. The weather is trying to lay its soft, invisible eggs in the upholstery. You will know they have hatched when the sofa sighs while empty.

Remember to scrape the corners of the ceiling where the shadows coagulate. If you let the dark scab, the house will forget your name. When it forgets, the walls will narrow. You will become a photograph. You will become a damp stain shaped like an apology.

Tonight, sleep with a copper coin beneath your tongue so the architecture knows you are currency, and not meat.

In the parlor where shadows grew teeth, the grandfather clock ticked backward, each tock birthing a fingernail clipping that skittered across the floor like translucent spiders. Mrs. Harrow sat unmoving, her tea steaming with faces that whispered her maiden name—Elowen, Elowen—a word she'd buried under sixty-three winters.

The clippings gathered at her feet, piling into a miniature mausoleum, pale and curved like crescent moons harvested from a corpse's toes. She reached down, not to sweep them, but to pluck one free. It tasted of rust and regret, dissolving on her tongue into a map of veins that led nowhere.

Outside, the sky wept identical raindrops, each a perfect replica of her left earlobe, dangling from gutters. The clock chimed thirteen, and her reflection in the glass multiplied: one Mrs. Harrow smiled with too many lips; another wept milk; the third unraveled her own spine into yarn.

She stood, leaving footprints of peeled skin. The door handle turned itself, revealing the hallway where walls pulsed like breathing gills. "Home," it exhaled, but the air smelled of her childhood goldfish, exhumed and flopping.

Behind her, the clippings reformed into a child—her child?—with eyes of clock gears, grinding eternally. It reached out, nail by nail, to stitch her back into the tick.