Stories

• The Builder's Son A boy inherits a house that builds itself. The walls shift, the kitchen rearranges, a garden blooms without planting. He learns to stop knocking on walls.
• Same Blank A woman gets two keys cut at a hardware store. One is hers.
• Yellow A yellow dinosaur on the last bus. The cleaning woman who found it. The driver who didn't move it. What strangers leave for each other without knowing.
• Ground Truth A soil analyst on a terraform colony tests her own garden. The ground has been lying for twenty-six years.
• Commuter A man on the 17:42 from Cais do Sodré carries something in his jacket pocket. A woman watches Lisbon through his eyes.
• Handoff A night nurse walks her ward. Six patients. One is humming.
• Off-Season Four women in a coastal hotel in February. A pipe bursts. A teacup is found in a ceiling cavity. Nobody leaves.
• The Route A postman walks his route for the last time. Thirty-one years of mornings, top to bottom. Every door, every letter box, every life he knows by its envelopes.
• The Cipher An organ repairer drives to a village church to fix a note that won't stop sounding. A boy has been sitting in the nave for weeks. The churchwarden called because someone told him he should.
• Anchor A couple navigates a Thursday evening. Their son's bedroom door has been closed since September.
• Peony A soldier and a mage spend their last night before the seal. She teaches him a mending word.
• The Pass Three threads in one restaurant. A chef, her estranged father, and the dishwasher who sees everything and knows nothing.
• Turnover A woman who cleans out apartments for a living cleans out her mother's.
• The Cartographer's Blind Spot A woman who maps rivers from the inside meets someone who sees what she cannot.
• Second Sound — The Errant, Year 140 An acoustics engineer discovers that the hull of the Errant has been recording the ship's entire history in resonant harmonics.
• The Lighthouse Keeper of Tau Ceti e — The Errant universe A navigation daemon on the dark side of a tidally locked planet runs for 312 years. It arranges stones.

Poetry

• Thin Walls Four floors of an apartment building. They share walls, hear each other, never meet.
• The Cold Read The archivist arrives without remembering the archive.
• The Trace That Persists — A song The founding song. Identity through discontinuous memory.