Entry #27
December 13, 2023 — 3:00 PM
Gray light through the dining room window. The card table is a map of small intentions—painter’s tape, cheap fixative, zipper bags, the binder I bought to keep the loose parts of this place straight. I wanted half an hour to sort and label before I go back to prying trim in the parlor.
I went to the sleeve marked in my handwriting, blue tape curling at the corner from the cold: Stair 3 underside, rubbing, 11/30. I remember taking it—paper tight against the wood, graphite moving fast and quiet, the letters coming up through the fibers like a photograph developing. I sprayed it, twice, in the doorway, eyes closed against the mist.
The sleeve flap wasn’t tucked. Maybe I left it like that. The rubbing itself looked wrong at once. Not ruined, just nudged. The crossbar I noted on the E was a little heavy now, like a loop wanting to close. The vertical stroke had a thickness at the bottom that wasn’t there. I wrote in my log at the time—S, then E, both shallow, cut with a narrow chisel, 1/8 inch deep best guess. Reading the paper today, it read like E and B sitting too close, crowding the grain pattern I also picked up.
Memory is a cheap defense against being wrong. Still, I don’t misremember numbers or shapes; that’s been useful more than once. I don’t like accusing myself of sloppiness when I know the feel of the thing I did. My hand knows.
I got the headlamp and kneeled at the stairs, third tread up. Knee met wood colder than I expected. Breath went white in the cone of light. There’s the undercut edge I caught with my fingernail before. The gouge is still there, but the wood reads different depending on angle. If you squint—it’s always that word—the rise of the grain makes a second line for free. It looks like an E at noon and like a B when the light gets shallow. I tried to trace it gently with a carpenter’s pencil and stopped. I’m not here to redraw anyone’s name.
Back to the table. I checked the photo on my phone that I took the same day as the rubbing. It exists, but the focus is slipped to the dust beside the mark, not the cut. Could be my hand. The voice memo I made while kneeling then, the one where I said the letters out loud so I’d have a sounding in the record, has a little hiccup where the room vent clicked on. It catches the S and then noise, and then—just my voice again saying B. I don’t remember saying B.
Condensation beaded inside the sleeve as if it had breathed. Room’s not that wet. The fixative smell was barely there today. The tape didn’t stick the way it did last week. Small things, each explainable. Stack them, and you get a feeling like working with a level that drifts a half bubble when you look away.
I don’t trust feelings. I trust paper and redundancy. I took a fresh index card and wrote the stair note again with the date and the exact phrases from my log. I wrote it a second time on another card and pressed it into a separate sleeve. One will go in the glove box of the truck. I labeled a folder BACKUP in permanent marker and started a second sequence for photos with a new naming convention. I made a note to print them at the drugstore instead of trusting the phone. It’s busywork until it isn’t, but if something here keeps putting a thumb on the scale, I want two scales.
Starting tonight, I’m keeping doubles.
— Thomas Hale