Signals

at 11:13 she checks herself as one checks the sea has tea and toast with the dogs he wears the face with the accusation says it is nothing she says right again thinking how expensive it has become to erase the lines on her forehead the day splits like

The message pings at 6:47. It wakes the floorboards. Then the dogs. Then the thought that the world has changed. The curtains observe. The kettle prepares. An old lawyer in Monaco wants her thoughts on a case he calls complicated. He does not ask for her time. He moves

The gate has been trying to confess for weeks. First it claimed the motor was tired. Then the card reader had lost conviction. Then the central unit no longer recognised the hour. Each update arrived as a minor truth, delivered with the calm of one who believes the next sentence

Applied for a job in Riyadh On my lunch break, a whim of curated mischief. Checked “Approach to Ethics” and “Other.” They’ll never know how much subversion can fit into a checkbox — when you’ve spent a lifetime being one.

There is a man who draws diagrams on the surface of closed doors. He says they explain what’s behind them. Sometimes someone inside is screaming. He calls that symbolic interference. Later, in a quiet magazine, he folds the siren into origami. He says: look, a theory. Down the hall,

The days fall out of sequence again. The fork appears before the hand, then the window – then the question: ‘Is this morning, or just another sentence with light in it?’ ⸻ Someone says something kind. She touches it with gloves on. The compliment writhes a little. She leaves it on the

Guten Abend. Achtung. This is your crew speaking. We will shortly begin the process of letting go. Please take a moment to locate the exits. Your child will not use them. He lives here now. Ensure all visiting emotions are stored securely before take‑off. Do not block the aisle

The corridor hosted a rehearsal a play drafted in absence. Props included: a vending machine, two shadows, poor timing. A correction entered the scene dressed as punctuation. It was too sharp, and the marble floor feigned offence. Later, the archive misfiled the event under meteorological anomalies. In the margin, faintly:

She corrected the angle of paintings in other people’s houses. The tilt of walls briefly steadied. The chair judged her manner blunt. The window mistook her for weather. The floor, which had carried her the longest, stayed silent. The machine, still in beta, sent a word for it. It

The world had misplaced its reading glasses. A notice went up in the square. It read: Taxes, Regulations, Procedures. A man in a hurry insisted it said: Urgent, Medical, Forbidden. By evening, the chaos had spread. They brought receipts as scripture, parking tickets as pardons, timetables, bound and footnoted. The