Morning is a curtain that forgets to open. My room has the color of inside-a-pocket; the light that does get in is tired and thin, like it had to fight the hallway to reach me. The desk looks like it tried to build a small city out of paper and gave up at dawn: scabbed mugs, graphite smears, capped pens lying like spent cartridges, a stack of drafts that lean against one another for balance and dignity. In the middle, wrapped in clean cloth, sits the thing I pretended last night I would stop touching so I wouldn't ruin it.
I reach for my phone before I reach for water. My thumb hovers long enough to register the guilt and then refuses to carry it.
Not coming in today. Sick.
I add nothing. No emoji to sand the edge off. No promise to bring notes later. I send it to Tsubaki and flip the phone face-down before it can decide to act like a conscience. The screen thuds softly against the wood. I stare at the blank back like it could leak relief.
"Time to get to work," I tell the air, which doesn't need a pep talk.
I don't put on my uniform. The blazer hangs off the chair like a witness. I step around it and sit, the chair's old complaint rising up to greet me, the kind you learn to stop hearing. My hands are already moving—glove, cloth, tiny bottle, the neat brutality of getting a station ready. Cover the lamp, check the seals, count the disposable things as if counting them can keep the clock honest. I unwrap the cloth and the room inhales with me.
You're not a cure, I tell it, the way some people tell dogs they're a good boy just to hear the cadence. You're a doorstop. A piece of chalk to hold the door open a little longer.
The quiet is so clean I can hear my own pulse. I make it dirtier with work.
Hours do the rubber-band thing. I write and test and cross out, rewrite with a smaller hand. I adjust a ratio that looked perfect at midnight and insolent now. I solder one sentence onto another and then cut them both apart because when I say them aloud they wobble. I pick up a pipette and my fingers forget elegant, go for reliable. I whisper through steps like dates for a quiz I can't fail twice.
When the edge of the table grooves my forearms too sharply, I stand, stretch, apologize to the spine for the way I treat it. The window shows me the school roofs in the distance like ships beached on asphalt. Somewhere in there a bell pretends to matter. I don't check the time. Time is big and rude and doesn't deserve politeness today.
Thirst elbows hunger out of the way. I find half a bottle of tea and take the gamble. It tastes like leaves that didn't win, but it convinces my throat to let my voice work. "Not a cure," I say again, to the object and to myself, "time." The word is already sore from overuse and still the only one that fits.
I turn back to the desk and the edge of the world narrows until I can balance on it.
Every few minutes my brain tries to be helpful and drags in a scene I didn't invite. Kaori on a bench, kaoris-laugh: you're dramatic. Kaori on a stage, the moment before color. Kaori on a floor, the color wrong. I shoo them like sparrows. Not because I don't want them; because wanting them is an unhelpful luxury mid-procedure.
Then, because my brain is a worse friend than it knows, it opens a door that hasn't been intruded on in years.
Her parents.
Not the hospital corridor memory everyone has—you know the one, with the machine that insists on telling the truth too loud, with the nurse who has perfected the art of being somewhere and nowhere at once. A different one. A kitchen, quiet enough to hear the refrigerator consider its own mortality. Bowls stacked like they were expecting soup. A calendar with a cheerful fruit print, days crossed off neatly until they weren't. He stands there with his hands on either side of the sink as if it might tip if he lets go. She sits because the floor is the only thing that will agree to hold her. Their faces don't look broken so much as rewritten in a handwriting no one can read.
My grief in that timeline had felt like a room I couldn't get out of. Theirs was the house being condemned around them. If I'd been gutted, they'd been taken apart and left in the yard for weather to decide the rest. The storybook comparison arrives uninvited: the three bears, their cute domestic home —chairs, porridge, beds—emptied, the smallest bowl knocked to the floor, everyone acting like it was inevitable, like the story had always had that missing line and we just hadn't learned to read it yet.
I realize I'm holding the pen so tight my fingers have turned into strangers to their own blood. I put it down on purpose and press my palm to the wood until the grain remembers me. "Never again," I say to the desk and the tea and the cloth and the lamp and the object and any god bored enough to eavesdrop. "Never."
The next five lines I write are very neat. Then the neatness gets tired and surrenders to speed. I build a tiny bulwark out of bullet points. I draw an arrow that argues with gravity and wins. I scratch out a sentence it took me ten minutes to love because love is not the point. I mutter, "controls, controls," so I don't dare omit them out of arrogance, because the man I'm taking this to does not forgive arrogance in children.
I get dizzy. You can function on vow-fumes only so long. I peel a clementine I didn't remember buying. The skin comes off in a single surprised ribbon; oil freckles the air; my fingers learn the lesson and stay bitter. I eat too fast and hiccup and then laugh at the hiccup and then breathe carefully like I'm in a class about not making a fool of yourself in small ways.
The phone buzzes, a cat stirring with opinions. I don't look at it. I look at the window and let the buzz use the glass to leave the room. The silence that returns feels offended. Good.
Back to it. I adjust the way a sentence reveals information. I move a clause to the front like showing ID before the bouncer asks. I add a diagram I can justify if someone grinds it between their teeth. I underline one warning three times and then erase one of the lines because two is urgent and three is panic and I don't want panic on the page.
I blink and discover my neck has turned into metal you shouldn't bend. I knead it with the heel of my hand and find a spot that telegraphs a pain all the way to my eyebrow. "You're a map," I tell myself. "Stop being a puzzle." The joke isn't funny but it makes the room agree to be a room instead of a complaint.
I keep pausing to rehearse how I'll say it to him, the line that isn't a pitch, not in the sales sense. Not a cure. A foothold. Enough time to climb to where the cure lives. Say it plain. Don't sell what you don't have.
And because every vow needs a cost, my brain gives me one: the image of Kaori reading a press notice, the thin draft they give families to prepare them for the possibility that something experimental might hurt a little and help a little and then, with luck, help more. She would make a face at the jargon and then make me explain it to her like we were cooking, and then throw the paper away and say, "We're busy today," and pretend not to be relieved until I looked away.
The chair doesn't feel like a chair anymore. It feels like an audit. I stand and stretch again and the room warps in the friendly, scary way that means your body is tired of pretending to be a machine. I sit immediately, because tipping now is stupid.
The lamp makes a circle of bright purpose, a stage for things that deserve a stage. The corners of the room have gotten fat with shadow; the light doesn't bother to go shake their hands. I check, for the fifth time, the seals on the case I'll use to carry the thing. The hinge still wants to act like drama; I soothe it with a patience I don't own any more of.
The phone hums again and again. The internal clock says: classes let out, this is where people text each other to invent purpose out of afternoon. Maybe Tsubaki wrote back with a scolding that sounds like a joke if you read it with a certain voice. Maybe she wrote, in that clipped way that makes you do what she says, Eat. Maybe she wrote nothing because she's busy being the gravity for eight different versions of a team. I keep the phone reversed, its lit face a suggestion I refuse to consider.
I sharpen a pencil with a pocketknife because the sound of it is clean. I erase carefully because haste ruins paper and I need the paper to remember me fondly when we arrive. I tape one edge down because the world keeps trying to make corners behave like ideas.
When the first crackle of evening gets in—the kind of light that knows how to find glass and call it by its name—I see my hands. They are not steady; they are steadier than I am. There's a respect you owe your own limits, and I am in debt. Fine. It will no doubt collect later.
I think about the meeting like it's a concert: the walk to the building my backstage, the elevator the wings, the man behind the door the audience you don't try to charm, because flattery is a language the room doesn't speak. You go out and you play truth, ugly and tuned, and you don't ask it to clap. You ask it to listen.
I take the cloth back in my hands and wrap the thing with what I hope looks like care and not like fear. It fits the case with a precision that makes my shoulder blades lower a fraction. I write my name on a small label because ownership is less about pride and more about making sure a stranger knows who to curse if they drop it. I slide the notes in under the elastic strap; the paper resents being restrained; I tell it to behave.
I allow myself the sin of a shower. Hot water believes in a world where muscles remember how to be muscles. Steam notices my lungs and acts like a guest who has brought jokes and a bottle. I stand there long enough to remember I am skin as well as intent, then turn it off and watch the mirror do that ghost thing. The person in it looks like he has been practicing a role called human and hasn't booked it yet.
I put on the uniform because the act turns the day into something that has shape. The tie gives up after the second try; I let it slouch. I run a hand through my hair and it resists on principle. I pick up my glasses and decide not to bother with contacts because I don't need to pretend to be bright-eyed for someone whose favorite pastime is telling the truth.
I touch the phone. The muscle memory almost flips it. I stop at the last inch and let it do what I asked it to do all day—stay shut. I only want the time. I only want the number that makes evening official. When I do flip it there's a small blizzard waiting—two from homeroom, one from a class chat, one from Watari that is probably a photograph of something stupid, maybe a shoe; three from Tsubaki. I do not read any of them. I drag my eyes to the top right corner and say out loud, "Five-thirty-eight."
Enough to get there and not have to pretend to be casual.
I slide the phone into my pocket face-out, so I can look at the minutes without letting any letters in. I take the case in one hand, the keys in the other. I do the ritual where you touch your back pocket for the wallet as if the city needs that talisman to allow you passage. The door sticks at first and then agrees to be a door. The hallway smells like other people's dinners and detergent. I lock out of habit and out of superstition and because there is a version of me in some possible afternoon who forgot and paid for it.
The stairs look like they have opinions about my knees. The street says it is evening by showing me people with bags and people with dogs and people who look like they don't remember where work ends. Somewhere a TV leaks laughter into a courtyard and the courtyard acts like it invented sound. The sky decides on a color and then changes its mind every few seconds, like an indecisive shopper.
My shoes walk me more than I walk them. I know the route so well I could draft it with my eyes closed—convenience store that sells gum and existential crisis by the register; a convenience store is a church if you need one. The crosswalk where the don't-walk man thinks he's a sheriff. The bus stop with an advertisement that promises a future for a low monthly payment and happiness in small easy installments. The building I'm heading toward rises in my memory and then in fact, the way important places rehearse their arrival before you get there.
On the way, my brain tries out sentences for when the door opens and the man expects me to waste his evening with a child's drama and I refuse to comply. *Thank you for seeing me.* No. That's true and useless. *It won't save her; it will buy her time.* Better. *If it collapses, I'll carry the collapse.* Honest and a little theatrical. *I know what I'm asking you to risk, and I also know what happens if we risk nothing.* Maybe that one. Maybe if I say it like it isn't a performance, he'll believe it isn't one.
The case sweats against my palm. I switch hands to fake out the ache and fail. A salaryman in a tie older than mine bumps my shoulder and apologizes with his whole body the way men in good shoes do. A small group of classmates in another school's uniform laughs at something I don't get to hear, and for a moment I miss belonging to conversations that aren't architecture holding up a future.
I let myself think of Kaori for one breath exactly, because not thinking of her entirely is a cruelty I'm not strong enough for. She's in a window seat somewhere in my head where light behaves; she's making a face at a term I took too long to explain; she's eating the middle out of a piece of toast because she insists that's where the flavor is; she's doing that pretend-mean voice that fools no one..
And her parents—my feet know better than to put them in the middle of the road. They walk alongside for a dozen steps anyway. I repeat the line under my breath that makes me move. "Never again. Never..." It isn't magic. It's a lever under the weight. If I sound dramatic, fine. The street can handle drama. It sees more every day in smaller disguises.
The building arrives with the kind of posture older buildings have: competent without having to prove it. The lobby is the same rectangle of light and laminate and the guard like a piece of furniture that reads. His sweater is a different color; the lamp on his desk is the same. He glances up, recognizes, nods. "Evening."
"Evening," I say back, politely, as if I belong here—which, for the next hour, I will insist is true.
He presses the button the way he did last time, with the we've-done-this-dance economy of people in recurring roles in one another's days. The gate clicks; the little green light does its tiny performance. I move to the elevator and the elevator obliges by arriving without a chime, like a serious person entering a room.
Inside the box there is my face and its sketch—eyes haunted by their own sockets, mouth set against its own softness, hair having lost an argument with everything. I don't try to fix it by looking. I fix the case in my grip and plant my feet and tell gravity I'm onto it.
Seven. The button glows and I decide not to decide how many times I will check my breathing between here and the door. The doors close with the same quiet dignity they had last time and the time before. The elevator hums, an old machine with a warm voice. Somewhere a compressor does the square-breath thing that used to annoy me and now sounds like a metronome I'm allowed to obey.
If I could have stayed fourteen in a way that made sense, I might be in literature right now, labeling metaphors until they gave up their secrets. I might be in the courtyard with a bag of fried things with Tsubaki pretending she's not counting my bites. I might be in a practice room with Kaori telling me my playing sounds like a person pretending not to cry. Instead I am here, which is the point, because every other place is a room in a house I already walked through once and the upstairs burned down at the end.
The doors open on the same carpet that protects footsteps by eating them. The hall smells like chemistry and vacuumed air. The frosted glass with his name is still small and still sure. I stop with my fingers on the seam of the case and count four heartbeats, the way you count before stepping into cold water. I have brought a thing that shouldn't exist yet, on a day I wasn't supposed to have for this, and I have two sentences ready and a third if he makes a face.
I lift my hand. I knock, three times, like I'm telling the door I'm here instead of asking permission to be. The sound is steady. That will have to be enough.
I wait.... Then
The door opens a fraction, like it's conserving hinge life. The strip of light from inside cuts the hallway. Saitou fills the gap as if gaps were invented to be filled by people who dislike them.
He looks me down "You look like hell," he says. It isn't curiosity. It's inventory. His eyes flick from my hair to my hands to the case. "You skipped school for this, didn't you."
"I worked," I say.
"Children work at desks," he replies, already turning his back. "Come in, then. Be quick."
The lab greets me with the clean cold of air that's been persuaded through filters. The light is the same disciplined bright that was here last time; the machines are still doing their polite hum-drone; the glass still glints in that patient way glass has when it expects to be asked to hold something important. On the far wall, the corkboard watches us like a jury. The empty square is still empty. I don't look at it, which is looking.
He gestures at the nearest bench with a chin movement so small it seems stingy. I set the case down. My fingers know the lock; they hesitate anyway. The click sounds louder than it is because the room doesn't waste noise.
"If you brought me a PowerPoint, I'll throw you out," he says.
"I brought something that doesn't present well," I answer.
"Most good things don't," he says, impatient. "Open it."
I peel the cloth back like undoing a bandage that doesn't want to admit it has nothing underneath to protect. The thing sits there in the lab light, unhandsome, exact in its smallness. Fragile, but not precious. A tool, if I am careful. It looks wrong on the polished steel, like a street stray in a vestibule.
He gives it a look that starts as contempt and shifts, minutely, toward caution. "And this is...?"
"Skyclarsin," I say. "Working name. Not a cure—a lever. A way to buy time."
"Skyclarsin," he repeats, flat as a ruler. "You named it."
"It named itself once I saw what it could do," I say, and thumb the latch on the second compartment. The papers are squared and clipped. The top sheet reads, in block capitals I can defend: SKYCLARSIN — Acute-Phase Modulation Strategy (Prototype). I lay the packet out not in a neat stack—he would take that as performance—but in the order you put knives on a tray for a surgery you plan to survive. "The thing that trips first when the house starts burning—this nudges that switch before it welds shut."
"You're still fond of metaphors." He doesn't touch anything yet. He inclines his head to the pages as if they might repent without his fingers. "Speak in sentences I can clearly hear ."
"You know the frataxin story," I say. "The metal mishandling. The false oxygen. The mitochondria throwing a tantrum that turns into a religion." I tap the second page. "Everyone keeps trying to calm the whole church at once. That takes a lifetime. I don't have one. So Skyclarsin...this is me bribing the usher."
"'Bribing the usher,'" he says, perfectly dry. "You are fourteen."
"I am," I say, and try not to sound apologetic about it. "And I have read far more than the polite amount."
He is still not touching the papers. It's a game he plays with himself: make the boy talk until he says something stupid. I meet the game with another: say the truth plain and refuse to dress it.
"It won't save her," I say. The air in my throat scrapes. "It will buy her time. And time is everything."
His eyes do a small, hard flinch he probably doesn't know he has. He still doesn't look at the corkboard. "There is no 'her' in this lab," he says, flat. "There is only 'it.' You will do better work if you keep it that way."
There are a dozen sentences I could set against that and none of them would land where I want. I swallow them and push the top page his way just enough to reset the distance between us. He gives in, which is not the same as agreeing. He hooks two fingers under the edge like the paper might bite.
He skims like a man at a train station, impatient for his stop. The first quarter-page gets a sneer—he finds a glossed step and assumes I'm lazy. He turns to the next and the next, and his mouth closes into the line that says he is doing the thing he hates: paying attention.
He flips back a page, forward two. The pencil in his free hand taps once, twice, as if testing the bench for resonance. His eyebrows, usually composed like they've been told not to embarrass him in public, begin the small migration toward each other.
"You," he says, without looking up, "are very lucky if this is luck."
"It's not luck," I say. "It's theft from a future that exists and should exist sooner."
"Grand," he says, thin. "You've added delusion to your inventory."
He reads another paragraph and his jaw shifts—just a millimeter, a sign someone at home would notice and someone here should not. He tracks a line with the tip of the pencil as if to underline it without leaving a mark. He stops at my warning block. He doesn't give me the satisfaction of saying I was right to place it there, but he lingers long enough to make the point.
"Your controls," he says grudgingly. "You remembered to have them."
"I remembered you would ask for them," I say.
"I always ask for the things that prevent funerals." He flips again. "Who told you to chase this angle."
"No one," I say. Everyone eventually.I let the implication sit. In a timeline where time behaves, this idea doesn't have to be stolen by a child in a desperate scenario.
He finally picks up the object itself as if it were a small animal that might decide to be a device at any moment. His hands, which are not gentle but know how to be careful, weigh it, rotate it, set it down in three positions that test a shape the way a musician tests a phrase in three rooms. "Where," he asks, "did you get—" He stops. He knows that question is a request for a lie.
"Built," I say. The honesty is a dare. "Not from scratch. From what the world leaves lying around when it thinks no one is desperate." My Stocks had come in useful aiding me in purchasing the resources to even get this started
"Desperation," he says, eyes still on the notes, "is a poor engineer. It over-tightens bolts. It sands away tolerances." His pencil lands on a formula I left like a guilty conscience and sits there. "This is...not what I would expect a child to conjure."
"That's the second time you've called me a child," I say. "I am not out here trying to grow a beard to make you like me. I am here because she will not live long enough for you to call this slow, careful work."
"Half-measures kill as easily as silence," he snaps, finally looking up, anger arriving as a courtesy to mask something else creeping in behind it.
"Silence kills faster," I say, before I can sand the edges off. "I have watched it do that. I don't have the patience to be polite to it."
He holds my stare for the length of three exhales. There is an entire conversation happening in his eyes with a person who is not me and not here. He drops his gaze back to the paper like it offended him by being true. His brows keep traveling, knitting the more they touch sentences he did not expect to find written by my hand.
"You do not claim cure," he says, as if saying it out loud is a test of my ability to tolerate reality.
"I do not," I say. "I claim months. Maybe years. Enough to climb to where the cure lives."
"You have an interesting relationship with hope," he says. "You throttle it until it behaves."
"You have an interesting relationship with anger," I say. "You use it so you don't drown."
"Do not diagnose me," he says, but the heat in it is brief and mostly for form.
He turns to the figure I drew with a pencil because printers do not respect miracles. His finger traces the pathway that looked sane at two in the morning and dangerous at four and stubborn at noon. "If Skyclarsin holds," he murmurs, mostly to the paper, " you will stabilize a system that screams first and settles later. If it doesn't hold, you will teach me how children break expensive things."
"It will hold enough," I say. "It will hold what it can. It is honest about its limits."
He snorts without humor. "You are not honest about yours."
I think about the mirror and the circles under my eyes and the way that shower steam felt like permission and decide not to argue, because he is not wrong. "I am aware of them," I say instead. "I plan around them badly."
His thumb settles at the margin of one page the way a thumb settles on the spine of a book you didn't mean to read all the way through. He lifts his eyes at last and there is something like—no; not respect. Not yet. The shape before respect, when a person accepts that not everything you've brought is nonsense.
"This," he says quietly, "should not exist. Not from you. Not from anyone...yet." It made sense. It only came with future technological developments this drug. He had to use several workarounds to make it due to technology being far less advanced and precise.
"But it does," I say. "And it can exist now. So it should."
"'Should' is a priest's word." He rubs the bridge of his nose, then puts the pencil down and picks it up again, as if punishing it for failing to be useful. "You understand the ethics of this about as well as a fox understands a henhouse."
"I understand the ethics of letting someone die when you could have given them a week," I say. "I understand the ethics of telling parents 'maybe tomorrow' until tomorrow runs out of tomorrows." The kitchen flickers in my head—the bowls, the fruit calendar. I keep my voice even anyway. "I am not trying to take your job. I am trying to make yours matter faster."
He does not like that sentence. He likes it enough to hate it. He flips to the back page and there they are—my warnings written like a scold delivered in glass. He reads them all the way through. He reads them twice. He nods once, the smallest concession, to the reality that I am not trying to sell him a miracle.
He asks three technical questions in a row in a cadence that would make a junior postdoc cry. I answer them with the honesty of a person who knows where his own notes are thin. "That will fail at heat," I say about one. "We'll need to baby it," I say about another. "Yes," I say to the third, "and the side effect is not lethal. Irritating. We can contain it in a trial to a point that will let you sleep three hours instead of none."
"You presume trials," he says, but not with the scorn he began with. "You presume resources."
"I presume you," I say, surprising both of us with the cleanness of it. "I presume you will call people and force their hands with your name. I presume that if I leave Skyclarsin with you, it will become more than something a boy made on a table in a room where the kettle forgets to whistle."
He stares as if weighing whether to throw me out just because hope is an irritant and I've brought a rash of it into his lab. He looks over his shoulder as if something on the corkboard asked him a question in a voice only he can hear. He turns back, angrier for having heard it.
"You will leave this," he says, clipped. "All of it. You will not speak of it to anyone. Not your uncle. Not your...friends. You will not make a poem out of it for some girl."
"I won't," I say. "You can write the first words anyone sees about it. That's the point. It shouldn't belong to me."
"Nothing belongs to you," he says, with professional cruelty. "You are fourteen."
"Everything belongs to me," I say, because the other truth is impolite. "I am fourteen."
He lets the echo of that sit. Then he takes the object again, pins its weight in his palm, and sets it down with the kind of gentleness that means he's already adopted the possibility of it. "I will run my own tests," he says. "I will make it prove itself to me, not to you. I will try to break it. If Skyclarsin breaks, you will not darken my doorway with this again. You will go back to your desks and your pianos and whatever keeps you from inventing more ways to make me die younger."
"If it holds?" I ask.
"If it holds," he says, and the word has more superstition in it than he would like, "then we will talk about next. And I will decide how angry to be."
"Angry at me?"
"Angry at the fact that you did this," he says, "and I didn't. And angry at the fact that it took a child to move a thing I have been standing in front of for years because the world refused to budge."
There is nothing to say that wouldn't turn the moment into theater. I bow. Not performative—an angle that says I know where I am. When I straighten, the room tilts once and then remembers it's bolted to the earth.
He stretches out a hand without looking at me and I put the sheaf of notes into it, because we both agree paper belongs better to him than to me. He slides them into a folder like closing a lid on a jar with a live thing inside and writes nothing on the tab. The absence of a label is its own label.
He gestures without ceremony at a small pad on the bench. "Write the name I should use if I have to call an ambulance."
"Kousei," I say. I make the letters clear, because clarity is a moral choice. I add the number he already has because rituals protect floors from opening up. I do not write 'Arima' but he does it for me, under the line, his pen neat and square as if to reassert adult status.
"You will sleep," he says, already riffling to the first page again, pulled back in by the offense of possibility. "You will eat food not found in a machine. And you will not come here tomorrow. If I need you, I will call. If I do not, I will be busy proving you wrong."
"Okay," I say. I mean it. I don't. Both are true.
He looks up one last time, pinned to the present by the small cruelty of concern. "You do understand," he says, enunciating as if to help the idea stick, "that if this kills someone, it will be a weight you carry for longer than you plan to live."
"I understand," I say. The kitchen is there again. The bowls. The calendar. "And I understand what it means if we do nothing."
He grimaces at that and flicks his hand in the universal sign for get out while I still like you less than this work. I close the case, which is lighter now that it carries only air. I want to say thank you and don't, because thanks would make it smaller.
The hallway's carpet eats my steps again. The elevator performs its kindness. In the mirror I am the same and not. My hands shake now that they've been dismissed from the job of pretending. I let them. The doors open with the same small breath of air they stole to arrive.
Downstairs, the guard looks up without lifting his head. "That the face of a win?" he asks, deadpan.
"It's a face," I say, which is safely accurate.
"Sometimes that's the whole job," he says, returning to his book. I appreciate men who collect useful sentences and hand them out sparingly.
Outside, the air is cool in the way cities apologize. Neon has begun to practice its pronunciation; scooters draw lines under the evening; the crosswalk man still believes in his authority. My pocket vibrates—a small, insistent insect—but I do not look. Not here. Not yet. I already spent all my sentences for the day on a man who doesn't clap.
I stand on the edge of the building's light, the night's edge testing my shoes. There's a temptation to narrate the moment, to write a line about shifting futures and doors that opened a finger-width. I don't. I shoulder the case that isn't a case anymore and start walking, the word I brought to the lab still hot in my mouth.
Never again. Never.