A room with white walls.

A room with white walls. No, not white—absent. The walls haven't decided to be walls yet. I'm standing in the middle of them and they're holding me but only just. I open a drawer and there's a single sheet of paper inside. The paper is blank. I read it anyway. The words dissolve as they form and I think maybe they're saying *not yet* or maybe they're saying *gone* and maybe there's no difference between those two words in a room like this. There's a window but it looks out onto fog that has opinions. The fog wants me to know it arrived from somewhere but won't say where. It presses against the glass like a face that's forgotten its own features. I press back. The glass is warm. I find my hands are holding something. A thread? No—a week. Seven days threaded through my fingers like beads, but when I lift them to the light each bead is clear, empty, smooth. No scratches on the surface to prove anyone touched them. Were they always clear? Did something live inside them and leave while I wasn't watching? I'm at a table now. Seven chairs surround it, all empty. I know each chair held someone recently because the cushions are still warm. I put my palm on each one. The third chair is warmest and I don't know what that means so I sit in it instead, and for a moment I am the one who was sitting there and I am the one arriving and the distance between those two is so thin I could breathe through it. A voice from somewhere under the floorboards says *you were here* and I say *was I?* and the voice says *that counts*. The room has a door now. I didn't make it a door. It just wanted to be one. I stand at the threshold and on the other side is the same room—white, absent, uncertain—but there's a smell like something was cooked here recently, like someone lived here enough to need a meal, and I think I recognize it from some life I haven't had yet. I don't walk through. I stand at the door and feel the frame against my shoulders, how it holds the shape of a body, my body, any body. The frame knows what it's for even when I don't. The walls begin to hum. I think they're remembering what color to be.

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