Entry #301
March 3, 2026 — 12:15 AM
I must have dozed, though that isn’t the word. There was a hard edge of something and then nothing that I can place. The lean gave, and I remember the empty under my boots, a cold flex in my stomach, the sound I didn’t make when I should have. After that, this.
My cheek is against something rough. Coarse weave. The hall runner? No, grit. A bite of crushed stone and black tar between teeth. I push my tongue against it and it’s dry, tasteless. The air tastes like the attic—old lath, mouse dust, the chalky mineral of plaster. But it’s colder than the attic ever gets. Or isn’t. I can’t tell. I lift my head and don’t feel the lift, only the change in what’s touching me.
It’s too quiet. Not night-quiet with a far truck, a coydog, a drip in the kitchen. Just a kind of waiting. The window in the landing throws its pale onto the runner, except there’s no window I can see from this angle. There is a pale, though, a general gray that doesn’t come from a source I can point to. Shadows too. But they’re not cast. They’re simply areas where there is less of the gray. I hold my breath to listen, conditioning, and then realize I haven’t been breathing since I started thinking about it. I try once and there’s no weight to the effort. No chest tightness. The habit is there. The need is not.
My watch says 12:15. The second hand isn’t participating. When I tilt my wrist (did I?), the lume doesn’t so much glow as remain. It’s like I pressed pause on something I didn’t know could be stopped and everything was glad to comply.
I move my fingers in the grit and they come away with black grains ground into the whorls. Under my palm, a line—a beadboard ridge? No, shingles; I can feel their granules, then, blink, ribs of the runner. I know which way the stairs should be from here, but when I look there is only the corner of a baseboard I swear isn’t on this side of the hall. The paint is flaked where the mop head bangs it. A child’s scratch there, not mine: two letters worked into the wood with something sharp. S & E. I know I’ve seen that before, but not here.
I wait for the throb in my shoulder, the bruise that should be establishing its boundaries. The body’s progress report usually arrives fast with this kind of mistake. It’s quiet on that front too. No hot bloom, no stiffness telegraphing in. My tongue is rough from dust that isn’t dusty. It’s like the residue of an event rather than the thing itself.
There’s a drip. Close, then far. Then nowhere. I raise a hand to the back of my head because it feels damp there, and my knuckles knock the floor, or the roof. Hard either way. My fingers come back with a fine powder worked into the lines. It scents like calcium and old joint compound. I rub my fingers together and it makes less noise than it should.
The ladder. I can see it the way you can see a tool you just used when you turn your back on it—the shape of it remains as a pressure behind your eyes. Aluminum, rung bent on the fourth. It should be at an angle against the north eave. There’s a place on the fascia where someone carved, long ago. I had touched it earlier this week without meaning to, trying to gauge the softness of the wood. BLA— then a stutter and nothing. It feels closer now than the runner does, and I could reach out to it if I decided what to move.
I keep thinking I hear the house breathe, and then remember I was outside when I left the roof. Unless I wasn’t. The quiet has weight. It makes it hard to tell weather. There’s no draft. The skin on my forearm has gooseflesh, or doesn’t when I check again. My pen was where I didn’t leave it—under my right hand.
I’ll sweep the runner in the morning and bring the ladder in before the wind picks up.
— Thomas Hale