--- short-stories ---
2024.03.02
note: this is a formatting test, not a real story

The wall had been breathing for three nights and I had decided, finally, to stop pretending it wasn’t. You learn to live alongside a thing if you give it long enough. The radiator ticked. The window held its square of orange light against the dark like it was the last lit thing in the city, which, from where I sat, it may have been.

Down there the rooftops went on past where the eye gave up. Somebody once told me every window is a person deciding whether to go to bed, and I have never been able to unsee it since. A thousand small verdicts, all night, all at once. I made tea I did not drink and watched them rule on themselves.

By two the room had arranged itself the way rooms do when no one is keeping score: the lamp leaning in, the bed half-made, the bag by the door I never quite unpack. A room is just a sentence you haven’t finished. I keep meaning to finish it.

The breathing, when it came back, was almost companionable. In, and the plaster swelled a hair. Out, and it settled. I put my hand flat against it the way you would against the side of something large and asleep, and I waited to find out which of us would move first.

Neither of us did. That is the whole story. I told you it was a test.