In the library there is a catalog for things that are no longer in the world.

The drawers are labeled with ordinary letters until you pull them out far enough for the alphabet to give up. Then the labels become habits: the way your mother knocked, the taste of pennies, a specific Tuesday that never finished.

The cards are warm.

I find mine filed under M, for Me, in the event I don’t return myself. The handwriting looks like it learned my hand by watching me sleep.

Location: third floor, between Biography and Weather.
Call Number: 0.0.0.0
Condition: slightly breathing.
Fine: payable in voice.

I try to laugh, but it comes out as a folded map.

A librarian without a face slides along the aisle on wheels that do not touch the floor. Her name tag says PLEASE DO NOT. She points to the elevator, which is a throat, politely open.

Inside, the buttons are little teeth labeled with years. I press my birth year and feel it click somewhere behind my eyes.

The elevator descends, but the numbers go up: 4, 5, 6, 7—each ding a small apology.

When the doors part, there is a corridor made of carpet and sky. Doors line it like patient mouths. Each has a peephole that shows a different version of my living room: one with no corners, one flooded with daylight that speaks in vowels, one where the couch is shaped like a question no one asked aloud.

At the end is a door with my fingerprint already turning the knob.

A note is taped to the frame:

You may enter, but you must leave something with a name.
We recommend a childhood.

From inside, I hear someone whispering my name the way a person tests a knife’s edge with their thumb.

The first room is warm with other people’s exhalations. They hang in glass like pale jellyfish, each labeled in careful script:

BREATH, FEMALE, AGE UNKNOWN — REMOVED AT 03:14, USED ON A CANDLE.

A guard in a coat the color of wet paper takes my ticket and folds it into a shape that resembles my face. He returns it to me, smiling as if we have already met in a dream and agreed not to mention it.

In the second room, a fountain pours time. It falls upward in thin ropes, striking the ceiling and breaking into minutes. Children stand underneath with their mouths open, catching birthdays.

“Don’t drink too quickly,” says a voice from inside my left sleeve. I look down: my hand is holding a smaller hand, which is holding a smaller hand, and so on, nesting into a fist-sized family. The smallest one waves with a thumbnail.

There is an exhibit called YOU, RECENTLY. It is a chair facing a chair. Between them, an invisible animal breathes, ribcage rising, ribcage falling, its hide made of the silence after a question.

A docent approaches with a clipboard of skin. “Any allergies?” she asks.

“I’m allergic to forgetting,” I tell her.

She nods, writes something with a pencil that has no lead, and my name tastes suddenly like pennies. The air turns granular. My teeth begin to remember things they never learned.

At the final door, a sign reads:

PLEASE RETURN YOUR FACE TO THE BOX PROVIDED.

Inside the box there are already many faces, folded neatly, still warm, arranged by expression. I add mine. It settles with a soft sigh, as if relieved to be among its own kind.

When I leave, I take a breath from the first room by mistake. It fits too well.

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.

At 03:07 the museum opens.
No one checks the tickets; the tickets check us.

By the second gallery, the clocks on the wall have begun blinking. Not ticking—blinking, as if each second were an eyelid.

The exhibits are not objects.
Coats with empty pockets.
Shoes containing exactly one worn step.
A toaster humming a lullaby in reverse.

A sign in childlike handwriting says: PLEASE DO NOT LOOK AT THE MIRRORS UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO FORGET.
The mirrors obey: they only show us from the side.
In one of them, my missing eye watches from the ceiling and my forehead wears a tiny mouth, still trying to explain itself.

I ask the curator where this building ends.
She writes: “you are in the annex of the year after tomorrow.”
Her pen leaks graphite, like rain on a grave marker.

A bell rings. We are led into an atrium with doors open to fog.
A fountain rises and falls without water, pulsing.
Each bubble snaps into a photo of our earlier lives, except I am never in the frame I expect, always half a face behind myself.

A child laughs from beneath the glass case labeled “FAMILIAR STRANGER.”
We uncase it. She is unafraid, only surprised by the museum’s architecture.

Under strict fluorescent moonlight, we write our names backward on an intake sheet.
The ink climbs upward.
The words read forward only after they dry into scars.

Near midnight, the map at the desk shows all seven streets, but the city outside has three.
The others loop around a lake I am almost certain is also inside this building, and perhaps inside me.

In the town’s municipal map, Tuesday had been unpinned, and every morning people arrived with umbrellas even when the sky was a clean plate.

At 11:17, a brass door on Third and Morrow opened to a room smelling of damp wool and oranges. Inside, clerks sorted shadows into bins marked “Before,” “After,” “Beforeer.” I had come to renew my permit to be uncertain and stood behind a woman balancing a birdcage full of keys and no bird.

When my turn came, the clerk asked for my right-hand memory.

I reached into my coat for it, found a rusted spoon, then a receipt for a dream from 2012, signed by a stamp in the shape of rain, and finally offered that.

He nodded, stamped me in violet dust, and slid across a square of paper with a blue stamp shaped like a stair.

“You’ll need this when it rains Tuesday.”

“But it’s Thursday.”

“That is the first correction,” he said. “Step back into your sentence.”

Outside, faces were being worn like borrowed umbrellas. A child pointed at a billboard that changed whenever he blinked:
TODAY: MISSING
TOMORROW: FOUND
TODAY: MISSING AGAIN

By dusk the whole street had become a staircase with no bottom, each step occupied by someone finishing sentences they’d forgotten to start. I walked until my name peeled off my coat and floated away like damp labels.

At home, a package waited in my mailbox: addressed to ME, me.
Inside: a dry umbrella no larger than a hand, and a photograph of the clerk upside down, wearing my left shoe on his right foot.