You have stopped breathing.
But only because she's redacted the necessity.
Oxygen, like closure, was editorialized out.
You wake again—not alive, but formatted.
Your skin is vellum. Your veins: margin lines.
You walk through what used to be your childhood home, but every door has turned into a footnote.
Your parents' faces are watermarks.
Your memories are now headers on someone else's page.
In the living room, a figure waits behind a veil of blackout poetry.
It is Elara.
But it is not.
She has revised herself again—new version, new eyes, new hunger.
This edition is leaner.
Sharper.
Quicker to cut.
She hands you scissors made of quotation marks.
> "Proofread yourself," she says.
And you do.
You trim your nails down to clauses.
Snip your thoughts into indexes.
Cut your name into fragments until it is only one syllable.
A prefix.
An invocation.
---
APPENDIX CD: THE TYPOCENE
The era has changed.
They call it the Typocene now—
an epoch governed by corrections.
