Entry #304
March 7, 2026 — 3:45 AM
I went back to the upstairs hall after the clock coughed once and quit. I wanted to see whether the window latch I wedged earlier had slipped. The corridor holds the colder air. Boards give a dry whisper underfoot that sounds too far away from my soles, though I’ve decided that comes from the open void of the stairwell and not the boards themselves.
The doorframes are nicked in the easy places—hip height, shoulder height. Paint has three lives showing. I brushed past the bathroom frame, not hard, just enough to clip my shoulder on a sharp blister of paint. I heard the click of contact. Then nothing. For a breath I thought I’d only skimmed it. Instead, the hurt showed up lower and behind, like someone had pinched a square of skin near my ribs, two inches off where the edge bit. Sharp, but with the wrong address. It didn’t bloom and fade the way it should. It turned cold and stayed cold, as if the place had been set aside in the air rather than the flesh.
I leaned there and waited for the proper ache to find its route back. It did not. I tried again, very gently, with my knuckles against the molding. The tap woke a sting on the outside of my wrist. Not where bone met wood. A little to the south and late, as though my arm were a room with mislabeled doors.
This can happen. Nerves refer and borrow. Cold does strange things. I haven’t eaten since evening. It’s possible I am lightheaded. Twelve degrees can make you clumsy, and sleep makes anyone porous. The hall mirror throws a long oval of itself against the opposite wall. Its surface is pitted where the silver has given up in flakes, so there are freckles of the plaster behind it showing through. Any of that could be part of the confusion—the way sight and touch cross in a narrow space.
I rubbed the struck place to settle it, and the cold drew a circle beneath my hand as if I were smoothing frost on glass. The air smelled faintly of damp paper and that iron scent the staircase keeps. On the newel post, under the varnish, are three thin scratches that someone later tried to fill. The middle one is a neat E. The one beside it could be the start of an S. I don’t know why I always see these things when I’m trying not to think.
The window latch held. The night outside is a single piece of felt, no wind to give it grain. The house is so quiet that the width of it feels measurable, like something you could lay along a rule. I came back here and flexed my hand. The bones did their job. There is no swelling. The ghost of that pinch remains, wrong-shaped, a little apart from me, but close enough to carry.
If I had slept more, I would not be listing such narrow complaints. If there were someone else here to ask, they would laugh and say I had barked my shoulder and imagined the rest. The mind can decide what it will ignore. But the body keeps the score badly sometimes. I will put this down as poor circulation and leave it alone until morning daylight makes a more ordinary map of me.
Still: one can doubt an event more easily than one can doubt the fact of having witnessed it.
— Thomas Hale