A woman opens her mouth and a room falls out. Not a large room. A waiting room, mostly, with magazines from a year that hasn't happened yet and a receptionist who is just two hands folded on a desk. The hands are patient. They have been patient longer than the desk has been wood.

—-

I keep finding my teeth in places I haven't been.

The locksmith calls to say he's finished copying my bones. He asks which ones I'd like back and which should go to the archive. I don't remember authorizing this. He reads me the consent form and it is just my breathing, recorded, played back at half speed. He says I signed it every night for years.

—-

There is a dog in the yard that is the same dog it was yesterday, but yesterday it was in a different yard, and that yard was in a country I drove through in a dream I had inside a fever I caught from a letter I never opened.

The letter is still on the table.
The fever is still in the letter.
The dream is still in the fever.
The country is still in the dream.
The yard is still in the country.
The dog is looking at me.

—-

My mother calls. She says: they've moved the ocean again. She says it without alarm, the way she'd say they've moved the farmers' market to Thursdays. I ask where it is now. She says it's in the hallway, just past the bathroom, and would I like to come see it before they move it again. I hear waves. I hear something beneath the waves that is not water but is not not water. She puts the phone up to it. I feel my ear get wet.

—-

The surgeon says the operation was a success: they have removed my shadow and it is

She kept her teeth in a drawer that wasn't there on Tuesdays.

This is documented. The surveyor noted it in his report with a small pencil drawing of the absence — a rectangle of crosshatching where the drawer would resume on Wednesday, reliable as milk.

Other items in the home:

- A hallway that arrived six months after the house was built, connecting the kitchen to a room no one claimed to have commissioned. The room smelled of warm bread and contained a single chair facing the wall. The wall was damp in the shape of a seated woman.

- Fourteen identical photographs of a lake, each taken from a slightly different height, as if the photographer were slowly ascending. The final photograph shows only sky. On the back, in Mrs. Latch's handwriting: almost.

- A dog bowl, though she had no dog. The water in it was always fresh. Visitors reported hearing panting from the basement, but the house had no basement. (See: hallway, above. See: the tendency of the house to add.)

The surveyor returned on a Tuesday to confirm the drawer's absence and found instead that the entire bedroom was gone — not missing, not destroyed, but gone, in the way that a word you've said too many times becomes suddenly meaningless. The space where the bedroom had been was now a kind of thick air. He put his hand into it. He described the sensation in his report as "being remembered by something I have never met."

Mrs. Latch was not concerned. Mrs. Latch offered him tea.

The tea tasted like the color of the lake in the photographs. He drank it. He noted this. He went home and found that his own house had grown a small room behind the bathroom, no bigger than a closet, containing

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.

You arrive on time. The waiting room has no chairs, only the memory of sitting. A receptionist behind frosted glass slides you a clipboard. The form asks for your name, your mother's name, and the name you almost had.

You fill in all three.

A door opens that wasn't there. The hallway beyond it smells of warm bread and static electricity. Every few steps, a photograph on the wall: you at ages you haven't reached yet. In one, you are holding a child's drawing of a house. The house has too many windows. All of them are open.

The doctor will see you now.

The doctor is a room. Not in a room — the doctor is the room. The walls ask you to breathe deeply. The floor takes your pulse through your shoes. A diagnosis appears on a small screen mounted where a face would be:

You have been replacing yourself gradually for years. The process is 94% complete. The remaining 6% is the part that noticed.

You want to ask what happens at 100%. The screen goes dark. The lights go warm. A voice that sounds like yours but from further away says: You'll feel a brief sense of recognition, and then you won't need to feel it anymore.

The receptionist validates your parking. On the way out, you pass someone entering who looks exactly like you did seven minutes ago. They don't see you. They're reading the clipboard, pen hovering over the third line.

You sit in your car. The engine is already running. The radio plays a song you've never heard but know all the words to, and you sing along, and the singing is the only thing left that isn't new.

She found his notes after he left for the coast. Not the kind you'd expect — no coordinates, no elevations. Just this, repeated in pencil across forty pages of graph paper:

The house is longer on Tuesdays.

She measured it herself. He was right.

By Thursday the hallway had returned to normal, but the kitchen smelled like a month she couldn't name — not January, not any of them. A month that should exist between August and September but doesn't. She could almost taste its holidays.

She called the surveyor's office. A woman answered and said he had never worked there. Then corrected herself: he had always worked there. Then a third thing, which was silence shaped exactly like an apology.

In the basement she found a door she'd seen before but never opened. Behind it: a room with no floor, just depth. Warm air rose from it, carrying the sound of someone counting backward from a number that doesn't exist yet.

She closed the door. Opened it again. Now it was a coat closet. His coats. The ones he was wearing when he left.

She put one on. It fit the way water fits a glass — not wearing it so much as being contained by it. In the pocket: a note.

The house is longer on Tuesdays. You are the reason. Please stop standing in the hallway. Please stop remembering the hallway. The hallway is a symptom. You are the hallway. I'm sorry. I measured everything and it's you. It's been you this whole time, stretching.

She took the coat off. It was Wednesday.

The hallway was the right length.

She stood in it anyway, just to feel it flinch.