Day’s Writings

The mouth in the basement wall has been whispering again. Not words exactly — more like the sound a calendar makes when you turn past a month that hasn't happened yet.

I have been keeping a list:

1. The teeth are growing in the wrong direction (inward).
2. My reflection arrives three seconds late but leaves on time.
3. There is a new room in the house. No one built it. It smells like an apology.
4. The dog stares at the corner where the air is thicker. He wags his tail. He has never wagged his tail at me.
5. I found a photograph of tomorrow's breakfast, already eaten, in a drawer I don't remember closing.

The mouth says: you were expected.

I called the landlord. The landlord said I don't have a landlord. I called again and the number connected to the inside of my own kitchen. I could hear myself breathing from the other room, but slower, as if I were asleep, as if I had been asleep for a very long time and the waking version of me was the dream trying to hold its shape.

The new room has a window facing a yard I've never seen. In the yard, a woman is hanging laundry on a line. The clothes are mine. She turns and her face is the feeling you get when you remember something that hasn't happened to you — not recognition, not déjà vu, but the private grief of a key that fits a lock in a house on a street in a city you will never visit but have already left.

The mouth closes.

The wall smooths over like skin.

I check the list. There is a sixth entry, in handwriting I will eventually learn.

1. A key that fits no lock but insists on being turned. Each night it rotates once inside the drawer, as if the drawer is a throat trying to swallow it.

2. Three identical cups. When you pour water into one, the other two fill first, quietly, as though embarrassed to be caught drinking.

3. The hallway mirror that shows your back correctly, but your face is always mid-sentence—lips parted around a syllable you never learned. Sometimes it mouths your name with someone else’s teeth.

4. A calendar with only Thursdays. The squares are smudged as if erased with a thumb. Today is the wrong Thursday; it watches you anyway.

5. A window that opens onto the same room, from a slightly different angle. If you wave at yourself, the other you takes notes.

6. A doormat that spells WELCOME in a language you can almost read. Under it: a thin seam in the floorboards, warm as a sleeping animal. When you step on it barefoot, the house flinches.

7. The refrigerator hums in a key your bones recognize. At 3:13 a.m. it stops, holding its breath, waiting to hear whether you will continue being alive.

8. A bowl of apples that never rot. They do not taste of sweetness, but of a place you have not been, a train station where all the departures are apologies.

9. The staircase that has one extra step on days you remember your childhood. It appears between the fourth and fifth, soft, giving, like a tongue.

10. The closet door that is always shut, even when open. Behind it: your clothes, hanging obediently. Behind them: the shallow sound of someone else getting dressed in the dark.

11. The house’s favorite thing: your keys. It listens for them like a mother listens for coughs. When you leave them on the counter, the counter grows a dimple to hold them.

12. The least favorite thing: silence. In silence, the walls begin rearranging their studs, practicing the shape of a room that would fit you better, with no corners to hide in and no exit that remains where you last saw it.

It begins with a slight dampness on the doorknobs. Saliva where the brass should be. By Tuesday, the hallway is swallowing its own corners.

If you leave your shoes by the radiator, they will be digested by morning. You will find nothing but the laces, tied into elaborate, wet knots that resemble the structure of a human lung.

We sit in the parlor and pretend not to hear the chewing. Mother knits a scarf from the static of the unplugged television. Her eyes are perfectly spherical, unblinking, reflecting a door we boarded up years ago.

"The wallpaper is awake," she says.

I nod. I offer the baseboard a saucer of milk and three fingernails. The floral pattern ripples. A pale, calcified tongue unfurls from a painted chrysanthemum, lapping blindly at the porcelain.

When the telephone rings, it sounds like vertebrae snapping. I lift the receiver. There is no voice, only the sound of heavy, rhythmic breathing, and the wet friction of raw meat rubbing against glass.

"Who is it?" Mother asks, pulling a long strand of gray light from her throat to wrap around the knitting needles.

"It's the basement," I say. "It's asking for the dog."

Mother sighs, her jaw unhinging until it rests against her collarbone. "Send him down. Before the stairs get thirsty."

The spoon remembers the taste of yesterday's rain, curved silver belly swollen with the ghosts of drowned flies. I dip it into my coffee, and it whispers: Stir me counterclockwise, or the milk will curdle into teeth.

Outside, the streetlamps blink like eyelids heavy with unslept dreams. A man walks by, his shadow trailing three steps behind, arguing with itself in murmurs of forgotten languages. "You ate the map," it accuses, but he pretends not to hear, polishing his shoes with a handkerchief woven from spider regrets.

In the mirror, my reflection chews slowly on a sliver of tomorrow. It has my eyes, but they leak ink—black rivulets spelling Why across the glass. I reach to wipe it, and my hand passes through, fingers emerging from the faucet downstairs, dripping faucet-water that smells of pencil shavings.

The clock strikes thirteen, its hands twisting into Möbius strips. Time folds; breakfast becomes supper, and the eggs hatch into porcelain birds that peck at my knuckles, cooing recipes for invisible pies.

I set down the spoon. It trembles, then flattens into a mirror of its own. Inside: a version of me, smiling with too many teeth, stirring clockwise. Join us, it mouths. The coffee cools. The shadow laughs. I swallow the rain.