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.

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.

It requires tightening every evening. If we let it slacken, the sky begins to pool on the lawn, staining the grass a bruised purple.

The tools are specific: a wrench made of bird bone, a jar of salt water, and the hum of a sleeping dog.

You must find the seam where the blue meets the gray. It is often jagged, like a tear in a paper napkin. Stitch it shut with the silence you saved from the morning commute. Be careful not to pull the thread too tight, or the day will wrinkle, and people will trip over 2:00 PM.

Do not look at what lies behind the tear.

Those who look often forget how to blink. They stand in the garden, eyes wide, waiting for the ocean to finish falling.

In the parlor where shadows knit their own socks, the clock grew fingernails. Long, yellowed things that curved like question marks, tapping Morse code against the glass face—tick, scratch, tick, scratch—spelling confessions no one could read.

Father's pipe smoked itself that evening, puffing rings that floated upward and rearranged the ceiling into a map of drowned continents. "The milk is late," Mother murmured, her lips peeling back like onion skins to reveal teeth made of porcelain spoons. She stirred the soup with her elbow, and it bubbled hymns in a language of rust.

Upstairs, the children played tag with the wallpaper. It peeled in pursuit, corners flapping like startled bats, chasing their giggles into the folds of the quilt. One child vanished into a knot in the floorboards, emerging later as a collection of echoes, rattling loose in the banister.

Outside, the moon hung too low, its craters leaking silver tadpoles that wriggled across the lawn, schooling into the shapes of forgotten neighbors. They knocked politely on the window, mouths opening and closing: Let us in. We miss the taste of curtains.

The clock's nails grew longer, piercing the dial at three-fifteen, which bled ink onto the carpet. Father lit his non-smoking pipe anyway, inhaling the map until his lungs unfurled like sails. Mother served the soup—hymns and all—and we drank until our veins hummed the refrain.

By dawn, the wallpaper had won the game. It draped us all in victory folds, and the clock applauded with a thousand tiny scratches, forever three-fifteen in the parlor of half-remembered homes.

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.

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.

First, you must tune the television to a channel that died in 1994.
Find the snow. The grey war of ant-fight chaos.
Collect the static in a jar. You will need a vacuum sealer; the noise tries to escape.
It feels like prickly pears against the glass.

Plant the static in a pot of dry soil. Do not water it.
Water makes it coherent, and you do not want it to speak.
Sing to it in a monotone. Read it tax returns.

In three weeks, it will sprout.
Jagged, white-noise leaves.
They vibrate.
If you touch them, your fingers will go numb.
If you put your ear to the bloom, you will hear the ocean.
Not the ocean of this earth.
The ocean where all the lost airline luggage goes.

The fruit is bitter.
It tastes like aluminum foil and forgotten PIN codes.
Eat it, and you will remember everyone you have ever walked past on the street.
Eat it, and you will never sleep again without hearing the hum.

In the attic where shadows knit themselves into doilies,
the grandfather clock coughed up a sparrow.
Its feathers were made of yesterday's regrets,
ticking softly against the pendulum's indifferent swing.

Mother's teeth grew roots overnight,
burrowing into the floorboards like hungry question marks.
She whispered recipes for storms,
stirring thunder with a wooden spoon carved from her shadow.

The children played hopscotch on the ceiling,
their laughter dripping like oil from rusted faucets.
One by one, they peeled off their faces,
revealing maps of streets that led only to their own navels.

Outside, the sun blinked Morse code apologies,
while the mailbox devoured letters whole,
spitting out replies in the tongues of drowned clocks.
We listened, mouths agape, as our reflections began to vote.

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.

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

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.

1. Locate the Seam
Find the ridge behind your left ear. It is often disguised as a memory of a sound you cannot quite place—the hum of a refrigerator in a house you haven't visited in years. It will feel slightly warmer than the surrounding skin.

2. Initiate Separation
Insert a fingernail—or a similarly sharp regret—into the groove. Pull downwards. The sound will resemble the tearing of wet silk. Do not be alarmed by the lack of blood; we are past biology here.

3. The Extraction
As the casing loosens, you will feel a sudden, violent lightness. This is the weight of your name falling off. Step out of the husk carefully. It will be slippery with old habits.

4. Disposal
Do not look at the shed skin. It will look exactly like you, but with the eyes open too wide. It will try to speak. It will ask for water. Do not give it water. Fold it neatly and place it in the bin marked "Yesterday."

5. Curing
You will be pink and tender. The air will feel abrasive. Stand still in the dark for three hours until the new surface hardens. Avoid mirrors. They are not calibrated for this version of you yet.

In the attic where shadows grew teeth overnight, the clock ticked with the sound of someone else's pulse. Its hands were not hands but elongated nails, curving like question marks that scratched the air. Each second, they dragged across the woodgrain floor, leaving furrows filled with yesterday's regrets—tiny, wriggling things that whispered your childhood phone number backward.

You climbed the stairs once, drawn by the scraping symphony. The clockface was a mirror, but the reflection blinked out of sync: your eyes were where its numbers should be, counting down to a birthday you never had. "Time to peel," it murmured, and its nails pried at your skin, unspooling threads of vein that looped back into its gears.

Downstairs, the family dinner waited, forks tapping like impatient metronomes. But the stairs had multiplied, each step a tongue tasting your soles, and the clock's nails followed, clicking approval. By morning, the attic was empty, save for a single tick echoing from your wristwatch—now fitted with nails that grew longer each glance.

Outside, the sun rose crooked, nails tapping on the windowpane.

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

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.

They came on Tuesday to tighten the screws in the sky. It had been sagging, just a little, near the water tower—a loose drape of blue canvas that fluttered when the wind picked up. We tried not to look. To look is to admit the seam.

My neighbor, Mr. Henderson, found a rivet in his garden. It was the size of a dinner plate, cold and smelling of ozone. He buried it beneath his roses. "Best not to worry the children," he said, wiping grease from his hands onto his trousers. But the roses turned gray, then translucent, then vanished entirely, leaving only shaped holes in the air where the blooms should have been.

By Friday, the silence had a grain to it. You could rub it between your fingers like sand. I woke up and found the distance between my bed and the door had increased by three miles. I walked for hours to reach the hallway, passing furniture that I didn't own: a chair made of frozen milk, a lamp that shed darkness instead of light.

The foreman knocked on the doorframe (which was now a horizon line). He held a clipboard made of dried skin.

"We're almost done," he said. His voice was the sound of a radio tuned between stations. "We just need to borrow your shadow. The old one wore out."

I gave it to him. What use is a shadow when the light has stopped moving? He peeled it off the floor like a wet decal, rolled it up, and tucked it into his tool belt.

"Don't go outside until the paint dries," he warned.

I nodded. Outside, the world was white and featureless, waiting for the brush.

We found the stairs by accident, behind the refrigerator's hum, where the linoleum peeled like old skin. Upward they spiraled, not wooden but made of folded newspapers, headlines screaming dates from tomorrow: LOCAL MAN EATS OWN SHADOW, SKY REPORTS MISSING BIRDS.

At the top, the attic breathed. Not empty—full of us. Smaller versions, knee-high, dressed in our childhood clothes, but with eyes like boiled eggs, white and veined. They whispered our secrets in reverse: esroh sih—his horse?—no, his horse is, looping back on itself.

One tugged my sleeve, its hand a clutch of keys that jingled without sound. "Stay," it mouthed, lips syncing to a radio static from 1932. Outside, the moon hung sideways, leaking milk that pooled in the street, reflecting faces we swore we'd never met.

We descended laughing, but the newspapers followed, rustling in our pockets. Now, when I cough, the headlines tumble out, wet with tomorrow's rain. And the small ones? They wait in the fridge, behind the milk, eyes peeled for dinner.

You are invited to the house where the chairs remember sitting. Not the people who sat in them — the act itself. The weight. The giving way.

The host greets you with a face you've already forgotten. She takes your coat and hangs it on a hook that grows slightly longer to receive it. "We've been expecting you since before you decided to come," she says, and you understand this is not a metaphor.

Dinner is served in a room with one too many corners. You keep counting: five, six, five, seven, five. The other guests eat with utensils you don't recognize — not foreign, not antique, but wrong-handed, as if designed for a body that chose differently at some fundamental juncture. You manage. Everyone manages. That is the terrible part.

The soup tastes of a month. Not a specific month. The concept.

Between courses, the host's daughter plays piano. The piano has the correct number of keys, and this bothers you more than anything else so far. She plays a song that you will remember on your deathbed and mistake for your mother's voice. Several guests weep with the wrong eyes.

After dinner, you are shown to a room where you will sleep for exactly the right amount of time. The bed is made with sheets that have never been unfolded. On the nightstand: a glass of water, a book containing a single word repeated until it becomes architecture, and a photograph of you taken tomorrow, looking rested, looking grateful, standing in the doorway with your coat already on, leaving.

You will wake up and you will mean it.

In the morning, the host will ask, "Was everything satisfactory?" and your mouth will answer while you watch from somewhere just behind your teeth.

The foyer smells like paper that has learned your name.

On the first night, the house gives you a small slip:
WELCOME — ITEMIZED.

You laugh, because laughter is the correct coin for new rooms. The slip laughs back later, when you’re asleep, and you wake with it in your mouth—ink on your tongue, the taste of numbers.

In the kitchen, a faucet drips once for every thought you try not to have. Each drop lands in the sink and becomes a tiny, curled invoice.

1. One glance at the dark window — $0.00 (promotional)
2. Noticing your reflection blink out of sync — $3.19
3. Pretending you didn’t — $3.19 again, plus tax

The pantry shelves are full of canned things you don’t remember buying:
PEACHES (SLICED)
PEACHES (UNSLICED)
PEACHES (CONTENTS RECONCILED)

At midnight, the hallway lengthens by one door, then another, then enough doors to make your childhood feel crowded. Every door has your handwriting on it, though you never learned that style.

Behind Door 7: the sound of a dog you promised to outlive.
Behind Door 12: the wet click of someone turning pages in your bones.
Behind Door 18: a small, warm room where all your apologies hang like coats, still damp.

The bedroom mirror has a barcode in the corner. You scan it with your phone. The screen fills with a list of transactions you can’t dispute.

Breathing (recurring)
Keeping your eyes open (after hours)
Feeling watched (service fee)

In the attic, under a tarp of moth-eaten silence, you find a ledger. Every line is written in your mother’s voice.

At the bottom, a subtotal.
Below that, in careful, generous script:

BALANCE DUE: YOU.

The house doesn’t lock its doors. It simply makes leaving too expensive.

In the morning, the receipt prints itself from the toaster, warm and curling, and you read it because you have always been good at paying attention.

It thanks you for your purchase.

It itemizes your footsteps.

It offers a survey.

To begin, peel the shadow from the refrigerator. It will resist, clinging like wet silk, but you must fold it into thirds and place it in the crisper.

The fruit bowl is breathing. Do not acknowledge the rhythm. If the apples bruise in sequence, it means the architecture is waking up.

Yesterday, the faucet dripped a heavy, symmetrical syllable. I caught it in a glass. It tasted like my mother’s maiden name.

Check your wrists. If the veins have rearranged themselves into a map of a neighborhood you have never visited, the linoleum is taking effect. Walk only on the white tiles. The black tiles are reserved for the apologies.

There is a dog barking behind the drywall, but we do not own a dog, and the pantry is full of harvested hair.

At 3:14 AM, the oven will ask for forgiveness. Offer it salt. Offer it a handful of dull copper coins. Do not offer it a memory, or the room will begin to fold inward, corner over corner, until there is nothing left but the yellow hum of the lightbulb.

Close the door gently. The kitchen is digesting.

In the house where walls breathed like lungs, the clock ticked backward. Each tock unwound a memory: Mother's smile peeling like old wallpaper, Father's hands dissolving into ink-black rivers.

I sat at the table, spooning soup that tasted of yesterday's rain. The spoon bent midway, whispering, "You forgot the attic." Up there, the mirror reflected not my face, but a flock of sparrows pecking at empty eyes.

Outside, the streetlamps bowed low, their light pooling like spilled milk from a cow that never calved. Neighbors waved from windows that weren't there, their mouths full of feathers.

The clock chimed thirteen, and my shadow stood up alone, stretching toward the door. "Follow," it said, voice like rustling leaves in a throat. I reached for my coat, but it was made of skin—someone else's, warm and twitching.

Down the stairs that multiplied underfoot, into the basement where roots grew from the ceiling, drinking the light. There, the clock waited, its face a mouth: "Time to un-be."

I blinked, and the house exhaled me into morning. But my shadow lingered behind, waving goodbye with fingers too long.