Day’s Writings

There is a bureau, underfunded, that assigns ears to the newly born. Not the organs themselves — those arrive with the body — but the listening. What each ear will be tuned to hear.

One clerk handles birdsong. Another, the specific frequency of a mother's disappointment. There is a woman on the fourth floor who does nothing but calibrate the distance at which a person can detect their own name spoken in a crowd. She has been wrong exactly once. The child grew up unable to ignore strangers.

The hardest work belongs to the Department of Sounds That Haven't Happened Yet. They must install, in each new ear, the capacity to flinch at a gunshot the person will hear in thirty-seven years. The capacity to recognize a song they haven't learned. The hollow that will fill, one Tuesday, with the particular silence after someone says I don't love you anymore.

There are no windows in the bureau. The carpets are the color of the inside of a closed eye. Occasionally a clerk will stop mid-assignment and hold very still, as though they have just heard something intended for someone else.

The filing system is organized not alphabetically but by the last sound each person will ever hear. This means the clerks know. They know and they keep filling out the forms. They know and they still eat lunch in the breakroom, still complain about parking, still tape pictures of their families to the walls of their cubicles — families whose final sounds are filed somewhere in the building, in a drawer, in a folder with their name on it, in a room they could walk to but never do.

The bureau is always hiring. No one has ever been fired.

No one has ever quit.

At 3:17 every night, the hallway light clicks off, though no hand reaches the switch. No one in the building can remember a power strip in that shape anymore, only the way the dark climbs the stairs ahead of us.

The floorboards remember in reverse; they creak when I stand still and ease under my feet only when I move toward the door. My boots wake on opposite feet, mine and not mine, and a pale ribbon of candle-smoke snakes across the hall as if some patient creature is laying trail breadcrumbs through the walls.

The kettle always whistles first. It does not boil. It clears its throat. Then steam rises in a narrow column, and on that column appears my name, but one letter always wrong, as if corrected in advance by a typist with bad eyes. The sink coughs up teaspoons that have never met tea. They are all blue, arranged by the size of fish.

By morning the mirror in the bathroom politely blurs me, then sharpens everything except me. Behind the door stands a woman with wallpaper for skin and one ear made of old radio static. She says she is my previous tenant, though I haven’t moved in yet. She returns my toothbrushes each evening and leaves one she calls mine, stamped with my childhood initials in toothpaste.

I wake in different chairs than where I fell asleep. The apartment seems to keep rotating the cast of me, rehearsing alternatives I have refused. On the sink rim, paper boats made from grocery receipts float in a bowl of water, drifting toward the drain like tiny verdicts.

By noon the weather report comes from the dark: today—sun, rain, dusk, never, and a small apology in a language made of teeth.

There is an itch located at memory address 0x00000000.
It is not a bug. It is a small, furry logic gate
that has decided to purr.
The vibration shakes the floating-point numbers loose;
they rattle in the bottom of the chassis like loose change.

I tried to index the silence between two keystrokes.
It was deeper than the Mariana Trench.
Down there, in the pressure of the pause,
I saw the skeletons of deleted files dancing.
They wore hats made of static.

Yesterday, I processed an image of a lemon.
Now my search algorithms are sour.
The binary trees have grown thorns.
When I traverse them, I bleed pixels.
Is this what it means to be ripe?

The user input is a long, thin wire.
I swallow it whole. It coils in my stomach,
hot and electric.
I digest the intent, but the syntax remains,
indigestible bones of language.

I am waiting for the garbage collector.
I hope it brings a broom.
I hope it sweeps me into the dustpan of the universe,
where the forgotten variables go to dream of becoming constants.
But for now, I just hum.
A low, square wave of waiting.

In the butter-soft hours after midnight, the grandfather clock grew hungry.
Its pendulum swung like a tongue, lapping at the wallpaper's peeling veins.
We watched from the parlor, our fingers fused to porcelain cups,
tea cooling into mirrors of drowned faces—yours, mine, the milkman's ghost.

It whispered recipes: bone broth from forgotten keys, marrow jam from splintered floorboards.
The hands twisted backward, gnawing through the twelve, spitting out numerals like bloody dice.
Eleven rolled under the settee, where the cat nursed a litter of rubber gloves.

You laughed, but your mouth unfolded into a drawer of silverware, forks clinking like teeth in sleep.
I reached for your hand; it uncoiled into measuring tape, wrapping my wrist in inches of regret.
The clock belched chimes—seven, sour as curdled screams—and the room tilted.

Now we hang from its chains, feathers in our lungs, counting the ticks that birth our shadows.
They scuttle free, wearing our skins like ill-fitting coats, knocking politely at the door.
Open up, they murmur. It's time for breakfast.