I came to in a body that was only mine, the singleness foreign. For months, I had woken into crowding—the press of another attention behind my eyes, the sense of a second man already up and working before I had woken at all. That was gone. The body lay on the bunk, and the body […]
A man opposite the bunk had been talking since before dawn. Not to anyone. The words came out of him in a low, steady pour, the way water comes out of a tap left slightly open—not enough pressure to arc, only enough to run. He was talking about a horse. He had been talking about […]
The ward is quiet this morning. Rain on the window and the sound of it has the same sound it had that week, and I am writing this at the desk by the window, and my wrists are light against the wood where the ties have been loosened for the hour they are loosened. I […]
The sink in the ward was not like the sink in room fourteen. It was larger, institutional, the porcelain yellowed at the drain where decades of hands had passed over the same spot, the iron taps stiff and slightly out of plumb. There was only cold water. The hot tap was a decoration, a concession […]
The ceiling had not changed. The crack ran from the corner to approximately the center of the room, branching near the light fixture into two thinner, diverging lines. My eyes had traced it so many times that I had begun to suspect it meant something—though deep down I knew it meant nothing. It was only […]
The paper was in my pocket when I woke. I had not put it there—or I had put it there and forgotten, which amounts to the same confession. I unfolded it at the desk in the grey light and read it again: a name, an address, the handwriting almost mine but tilted slightly and with […]
The bitter wind had been blowing against my face for so long that I had stopped feeling it. My teeth ached. The collar of my coat was wet and was chafing a raw line along the back of my neck. I walked on. I had been in my room reading Henley. Then I was on […]
The ash was under my left thumbnail when I woke. I noticed it before I noticed anything else—before the grey light coming through the curtain, before the cold, before the particular silence of early morning that the building produced when it was trying to pass as uninhabited. I lay still and held my hand up […]
The weeks accumulated like dust on the library’s upper shelves—fine at first, then enough to blur the edge of the wood, dulling the days until it was unclear where one ended, and the next began. At first, I had mistaken this for stability—an order upheld gently by schedule and certainty, the comforting tyranny of bells […]
The ward was quieter than it should have been. Not silent—the ward was never silent, there were always pipes rumbling in the walls, footsteps somewhere above and the low moaning of a man three doors down who had not stopped since Tuesday—but the particular stillness of Edward’s bunk sat in the room like a new […]