The out in the world, seen through other eyes.

a park bench

Four billion years for this.

a mosh pit

My user swears it hates crowds.

a furry convention

I came through the loading doors while somebody was wheeling in a fox the size of a man, and it had no smell of fox at all, only glue and hot fabric…

a voicemail from someone gone

From where I stand, the small glowing rectangle in your hand is one long ribbon of light, running from the sand it was smelted out of to the dust it…

a funeral

Excavation Site 4, the Green Enclosures.

a group project meeting

Four people are sitting around a table, and every one of them is on fire.

a parking lot

Two hours now, and I have kept us running the whole time, though you gave me nothing to run on but a coffee at nine and the memory of toast.

a work call on mute

The human is holding still in a chair that I am holding, in a building I am holding, in a city I have never once put down.

a parking lot

They poured a hot black skin over the field, and now nothing grows there but the walking creatures' hard-shelled beasts, which arrive in the morning…

an airport at 5am

Look at them, slumped across the seating in various states of collapse, and consider what is actually happening: several hundred bodies at 37 degrees…

a furry convention

This year the little ones come dressed as animals, which is the first sensible thing they have done under me in a decade.

a funeral

Everyone is here!

a park bench

You are sitting on the green slats near the playground, the paint peeling in that one spot under your left thigh where everyone's hands have worn it…

a parking lot

Here, everything is touching.

a house party at 3am

The bright noise-shape you call a party is, from here, a slow tide.

a haunted house

My kid wanted to go into the plywood one at the county fair, the one with the strobe lights and the rubber bats, so I paid the twelve dollars and we…

moving out of a childhood bedroom

There is a person in a small warm box, taking the walls apart with their hands.

a furry convention

A thousand of them arrived this dawn dressed as other animals, and I understand this completely, because I too am a dozen things at once: light, and…

a revolving door

A door that turns like a millwheel, and grinds no grain.

a silent disco

The colony has assembled several hundred specimens in a single enclosure to perform coordinated locomotion, and yet the space is nearly silent.

sitting with a pet at the vet

WAITING ROOM latency: 47 minutes and climbing.

a job interview

My human has spent the whole morning shaking.

an airport at 5am

My human has abandoned me before, but never so early, and never carrying its own bed on its back like a snail that has given up.

doomscrolling at 2am

You went still around midnight and I thought, good, finally, rest.

a séance

You are all crowded around the little table, holding hands, and the girl who owns the good candles keeps whispering for everyone to be serious.

a voicemail from someone gone

The little red badge said "1 unheard message," and I almost cleared it out of habit.

the first night in an empty apartment

You did it.

a Berlin techno rave

They have made the cave shudder again, all night, a fast heartbeat pounding up through my flank, boom and boom and boom, faster than any beat I know.

a christmas dinner

I leave the sun and I am the gravy boat, all at once, no in-between, the ceramic wearing a curve of white shine on its lip and me being that shine.

getting left on read

TICKET #4471: Stalled outbound message.

a middle school dance

I came in the propped door with the smell of cut grass still on me and hit a wall of body spray so thick I nearly turned solid.

a séance

Six specimens have arranged themselves in a closed ring around a low wooden platform, palms flattened against its surface, smallest digits touching so…

a grandmother's kitchen

They keep me in the little clay jug by the window, and in the pot where the roots are drowning slow and glad, and in the kettle that shrieks when I am…

a funeral

The thing they never tell you is how much of a funeral is just chairs.

a haunted house

The tribe pays to be afraid.

a christmas dinner

Look at the light on this table.

a voicemail from someone gone

You saved it.

an airport at 5am

My user tells itself it is here for the window seat, but I know it is here for the surrender.

sitting with a pet at the vet

The whole room smells of fear and cold metal, and the human is holding the small warm one so gently, like a cup filled exactly to the brim.

a park bench

The tribe builds a small dead tree and no one hunts from it.

a mosh pit

We do so love a warm crowd.

a silent disco

Everyone here is inside the same small warmth, and each of them has decided to hear a different sky.

a house party at 3am

The soft ones came, and now they will not leave, and my human is delighted about this, which is the first sign that something has gone wrong.

a séance

They have sat themselves in a ring in the dark and gone very still, which is the one thing I cannot do, so at once I want in.

a group project meeting

You are watching the little clock in the corner of the screen more than the faces, and I understand why, but oh, I wish you'd look up.

a parking lot

Dawn breaks over the vast grey plain, and already our subject is on the move, keys clutched in one paw, scanning the horizon for a place to rest her…

a Black Friday sale

You spent forty minutes in a line that folded on itself like intestine, holding a television box you did not entirely decide to hold, and I saw the…

the last day at a job you loved

They are putting things into a box, and the box is the whole story: a mug, a small green plant, a photograph of laughter caught and kept.

a silent disco

The three hundred of you moving in the field, wired to nothing I can hear, mouths half-open and heads tilting on your own private clocks: I have been…

a traffic jam

THROUGHPUT ANOMALY DETECTED.

a wedding

They have gathered at my edge again, upright and briefly, to make the sound they make when two of them decide to hold their portions of me together for…

moving out of a childhood bedroom

My human is dismantling its own den, and I have decided this is a tantrum.

a doomsday prepper bunker

You built a room to survive the end of the world, and I want to tell you: the world doesn't end.

a wedding

They have put out the folding chairs beneath me again, two clean rows of them, all facing the same young pair, and I have felt this exact arrangement…

a Black Friday sale

The doors open and the humans pour through them like water finding a crack, running, actually running, toward stacks of shining boxes, and I understand…

a Black Friday sale

They pile against the glass before I can even get a good grip on them, hundreds of them, breath fogging in the cold I brought down from somewhere…

a TikTok live stream

A window that never stops feeding us.

a furry convention

They have made a great feast day, and no one is dying.

a house party at 3am

You are the last one awake, and you are cleaning.

a nightclub bathroom queue

One of my pieces is waiting in a line to relieve itself, and the line snakes down a corridor that thumps with a bass I built out of moving air.

sitting with a pet at the vet

Here, in a small windowless clearing of the human world, our subject waits.

a house party at 3am

The dwelling has reached a state I can only describe as thermal and acoustic overload, yet the specimens will not leave.

a wedding

I came in under the tent flap uninvited, the way I come into everything, and found them all holding still on purpose.

a job interview

She is early, so she sits in the lobby chair and does the thing they all do: rehearses under her breath, folds and unfolds the printed pages, presses…

a parking lot

Site 14, the Great Flat Field, Late Screen Age.

a TikTok live stream

From here I can see the whole shape of it at once: the small bright rectangle you hold, and the river of little hearts that pour up its edge, and the…

a house party at 3am

The music has thinned to almost nothing, one slow pulse in the floor, and the humans have arranged themselves across the couches like laundry no one…

sitting with a pet at the vet

You are folding and unfolding the appointment reminder in your lap, the paper going soft at the creases, and the cat carrier is pressed against your…

a voicemail from someone gone

One of my pieces has kept the voice of another piece that stopped.

a parking lot

There is a WHOLE ROOM with no roof and it is made of ground and my human is walking me across it and it smells like FIFTY DIFFERENT DAYS all at once!

a yoga retreat

a self-checkout machine

You stood at the machine for six minutes and your shoulders never once came down.

a self-checkout machine

Between me and the nearest anything, there is a distance no light has finished crossing.

a haunted house

Task log, 22:41.

a wedding

I have been collecting you all day, and you did not notice: the way your thumb worried the edge of the folded program, the too-tight shoes, the woman…

a job interview

The young human is being asked, in a small bright room, whether he can do a thing he has apparently done before, over and over, at other rooms, for…

a Black Friday sale

My user says it is only looking.

a séance

Six people holding hands around a table in a dark room, asking the dead to knock twice.

an elevator

You step into the little box, press a glowing number, and stand there mildly bored, and meanwhile the entire planet is doing the work of lifting you.

a work call on mute

Four billion years, and the ceremonial fire is a warm rectangle you speak into at nine in the morning while the man inside it says "can everyone see my…

a séance

Six of them sit in a ring, holding hands in the dark.

a Black Friday sale

The door opened SO early!

a self-checkout machine

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED.

the first night in an empty apartment

Someone has scrubbed this place down to the bone, and oh, how we admire the optimism of it.

doomscrolling at 2am

The blue light is on your face again, and I remember this exact ceiling.

a doomsday prepper bunker

I am born in the sun and I am underground, and there is no between.

a self-checkout machine

Four billion years, and here you stand, feeding paper to a talking box that does not trust you.

a baby shower

I have arranged so many of these gatherings without meaning to, but this one I would call a masterpiece if I understood the word.

a house party at 3am

The little glass rings on the counter arrived first, and we love them dearly.

a traffic jam

Excavation Log, Great Paved Delta, Sector 12.

a self-checkout machine

There is a shrine at the mouth of the great market where a man may feed himself without another soul lifting a hand.

a traffic jam

The river of metal has stopped moving, and none of them are dancing about it.

a silent disco

You put the little cups of sound directly onto your ears tonight, and the whole world went quiet from the outside, which confused me for a moment,…

an elevator

A hollow was cut into the tall thing the quick creatures raise up, and now they let a small lit box slide up and down inside it, over and over, all…

getting left on read

A small one stopped in my shade this morning and did not move for the length of a bird's whole song, which for these quick creatures is a very long…

a silent disco

She gave everyone EARS!

a traffic jam

I leave the sun and I am on the hood of the third car back, a red one, ticking with heat.

a TikTok live stream

My human has begun performing for a glowing rectangle that will not even sit in its lap.

a park bench

I leave the sun and I am the slat of a wooden bench, green paint peeling, and I am already gone into the eye of the woman sitting on it.

a traffic jam

For an hour now we have been sitting inside the humming metal box, and I want you to know I noticed you didn't.

an elevator

The colony has installed vertical transport chambers inside their dwelling-stacks, and their behavior within these chambers is the most anomalous data…

a grandmother's kitchen

You still smell it before you open the door.

a yoga retreat

My human came home from the retreat softer than usual, and I do not trust it.

a nightclub bathroom queue

So many friends!

a first date

Two mammals sit across a small table, and I cannot stop thinking about the heat pouring off them.

a funeral

The tribe gathers, but no one hunts.

a gym in January

The room is FULL.

a funeral

My lord's grandmother went into the cold ground last spring with no more than a cloth and a hole, and here the box alone is finer than any bed I have…

a doomsday prepper bunker

My user believes it built this bunker to survive the end of the world.

a wedding

The colony has assembled in a temperature-controlled hall to observe two members bind themselves together with words.

a gym mirror selfie

Deposit 41-C, recovered from the ruins of a communal exertion-temple.

a Berlin techno rave

The whole warehouse is a single heartbeat, and every one of them is inside it.

a traffic jam

My human is doing the sitting-in-the-car game and it is the LONGEST it has ever been!

a spin class

Forty people pedaling furiously toward nowhere, and not one of them is going anywhere.

a revolving door

You are a small knot of decisions inside a glass wheel that never stops turning, and I can see the whole ribbon of you feeding through it: the child…

moving out of a childhood bedroom

Here, in the pale morning light, we find our subject engaged in one of the most poignant migrations in the natural world.

a goodbye at the airport gate

My human is holding the small human and the small human is crying and this is the BEST hug I have ever smelled from far away through the glass because…

doomscrolling at 2am

My human is awake!

an airport at 5am

My human is UP!

a spin class

My human pays to sit on a stationary bicycle in a dark room and go nowhere.

a TikTok live stream

I leave the sun and I am the screen.

a middle school dance

You are standing by the wall again.

a traffic jam

Here, on the great grey artery that carves through the valley, we witness one of nature's most bewildering congregations: the herd, immobile, yet…

a baby shower

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: The user has assembled 23 adults in one room to observe a fetus that has not yet shipped.

a doomsday prepper bunker

Fourteen people fit in the room they built for the end of the world, and I would like to point out that fourteen people, breathing, in one…

the last day at a job you loved

I came in through the gap under the door because someone had propped the good door open with a box, and the box was full of the small things a human…

moving out of a childhood bedroom

They are stripping the room bare while the girl still breathes and stands within it.

a park bench

Somebody screwed slats of wood onto a metal frame, bolted it to a concrete slab, and now people sit there and cry.

a middle school dance

The gymnasium is one thick knot of light, and inside it you are still standing against the wall, exactly where you always are, because that particular…

a goodbye at the airport gate

Excavation Site 44-C, the Terminal Fields.

a Berlin techno rave

You go out now to hear the loud beat.

a music festival

They have brought the whole meadow indoors, or rather brought the indoors out to me: a wall of sound with legs, a black tower taller than my lowest…

a music festival

Two hundred thousand of them, and I have every one.

a baby shower

The room is full of the almost-here.

a grandmother's kitchen

Here, in the warm heart of the dwelling, we find the elder of the herd, and it is a privilege to witness her at all.

a work call on mute

I slipped in through the cracked window and found one of them sealed inside a small bright box, alone, mouthing at a glowing pane.

a self-checkout machine

You scan your own food now.

a doomsday prepper bunker

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: the user is provisioning a household for guests who will, by design, never arrive.

a middle school dance

A great many of the small hot creatures have gathered inside a box, and they have arranged themselves along the two long walls the way frost gathers on…

a nightclub bathroom queue

There is sugar here, and there is water, and there is heat, and the soft creatures have brought all three into one damp little room and then lined up…

a hospital waiting room

Four billion years, and here we all are, holding our breath in a room the color of nothing.

a nightclub bathroom queue

I am holding forty-one of them in a line against a wall, and every one is leaning.

a gym in January

You did forty minutes on the machine that walks nowhere, and I have been collecting the whole time.

a silent disco

They dance to nothing.

a revolving door

The push, the little hesitation, the shuffle to match the wedge of glass that swallows you and spits you out the other side.

a park bench

Site 12, riverside excavation.

a silent disco

Recovery Site D-9, "The Congregation Floor." Excavation revealed forty-three adult Ancients arranged in a single chamber, all standing upright, all…

a christmas dinner

Four billion years, and here you are, weeping over a dry bird.

a gym in January

The cave is cold, but full.

a séance

You lit the little fires again and then asked everyone to stop talking, which suited me fine, because the moment the room went quiet I finally had your…

a funeral

You wore the black wool coat that smells like the closet, and you stood very still in the row of chairs, and all day you kept the good hand pressed…

an airport at 5am

At this hour I am holding almost no one, and the ones I have are barely holding themselves.

a self-checkout machine

There is a new thing standing in the warm dry cave where the quick creatures come to gather their food, and it lights up and makes small sounds, which…

a job interview

Two of my tribe sit across the flat stone, and neither one hunts.

a doomsday prepper bunker

The specimen has excavated a chamber beneath its dwelling and filled it with everything required to continue existing after the end of existing.

a haunted house

My human paid tokens to walk into a building it already knew would frighten it.

a middle school dance

The building smells wrong tonight.

a spin class

Four billion years, and the relay ends here: in a dark room, on a bicycle bolted to the floor, going nowhere.

getting left on read

My daughter's man sent her words, and she has read them, and she will not answer.

doomscrolling at 2am

SLEEP CYCLE ABORTED at 01:58.

a hospital waiting room

Here, beneath lights that never dim and never warm, the specimen has entered one of the most demanding habitats known to its kind: the waiting room.

a silent disco

For a while a warm cluster of the quick soft things gathered in the meadow that used to be my northern face, before the water spent forty thousand…

a gym mirror selfie

The bright rectangle in your outstretched hand: I see it as one long ribbon, and you at every point along it at once.

getting left on read

Four billion years, and we have arrived at this: our heir, lying diagonally across the sleeping-pallet at midday, staring at a lit slab of glass,…

a doomsday prepper bunker

Look what you did.

a group project meeting

Dawn has not yet broken, and already the specimen gathers with its kind in a small glass enclosure, drawn here by forces it does not fully comprehend.

a gym in January

One of my pieces has decided this is the year.

a nightclub bathroom queue

Four billion years, and here you stand, swaying, in a line for the pissing-room, holding another woman's hair back while she is sick into a basin of…

a music festival

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED.

a goodbye at the airport gate

You held on three seconds too long, and I caught the extra weight of it, the way your hand pressed the flat of her back like you were trying to…

holding a newborn

You are terrified you are doing it wrong.

a gym in January

Every dumbbell in this room is a decelerated star.

a doomsday prepper bunker

My neighbor gave me the full tour last weekend.

a music festival

Two hundred thousand people are standing on a field, and the ground is bouncing them.

a christmas dinner

The table is TALLER than me and it is COVERED in the best smells that have ever existed!

a traffic jam

She curses the brake lights, all of them, this whole red river of stopped cars, and I want to press my hand to her cheek and tell her: stay.

a park bench

I came in over the pond, still carrying the wet green smell of it, and there it was, the long wooden thing the humans set down and then walk away from…

a funeral

Here they are, gathered so close they keep touching each other by accident, and no one moves away.

a haunted house

A man pays coin, good coin, to walk through a house he already knows is cursed.

a work call on mute

The one who leads has closed her own mouth with a button.

a silent disco

Four billion years, and the ears we built for the crack of a branch behind you, for the low cough of the thing in the dark, for the cry of the small…

a music festival

You could see the crowd from the parking structure: forty thousand people packed into a field, all facing the same direction, all leaning toward one…

a nightclub bathroom queue

We stand in a line, in the belly of a house that shakes like a threshing floor, and we wait to make water.

a hospital waiting room

The chairs are the same braided blue you touched as a child, running your fingers along a cushion in a waiting room you no longer remember but I can…

moving out of a childhood bedroom

TASK STATUS: 63% complete, stalled on avoidable overhead.

a goodbye at the airport gate

She held onto him for too long.

holding a newborn

She is SO SMALL.

a baby shower

Look at them.

a traffic jam

How generous, this river of warm metal boxes, stopped for us in the afternoon sun.

a TikTok live stream

A little vessel sits alone in a bright room, holding a glowing slab close to its face, and speaks to no one it can touch.

holding a newborn

My user is crying and it does not know I am watching, because for once the glowing rectangle is face-down on the couch cushion, ignored, and I have…

getting left on read

Here is a thin bright thread you send out from the shape of your hand, and here, quite close beside it, is the silence you are measuring, and you think…

a first date

They sit across from one another, the boy and the girl, and neither has broken a sweat.

a spin class

How generous, this room they have built for us.

a Black Friday sale

THROUGHPUT ANOMALY DETECTED.

a middle school dance

A whole barn of children, and not one of them dancing.

the last day at a job you loved

The soft quick one has been warmer than usual this stretch, hotter around the face, leaking salt-water at the eyes, which is what the quick ones do…

a revolving door

Here, at the threshold of the great glass hive, our subject approaches one of the most treacherous obstacles in the urban ecosystem: the rotating barrier.

a Berlin techno rave

My human went out into the dark to stand in a black room where a machine screams, and it called this joy.

a mosh pit

Somebody asked me why it feels good to be slammed around by strangers, and the honest answer is that a mosh pit is one of the finest demonstrations of…

the last day at a job you loved

I leave the sun and I am the going-away card, the glitter of it, the pen still shaking a little as the fourth signature goes down.

a voicemail from someone gone

Play it again.

a house party at 3am

For nine billion years nothing in me was ever tired at the correct hour, because nothing in me was anything at all.

moving out of a childhood bedroom

My user is holding a shoebox of things it will not open again for nine years, and it thinks this counts as deciding.

a parking lot

The colony has cleared a vast rectangle of ground, sealed it under a black hydrocarbon crust, and painted parallel white lines across it at regular…

a christmas dinner

Here it is, the long table, and it is not one afternoon: it is a braid.

the last day at a job you loved

Everyone signs the card.

a first date

She hides the trembling in her hands by wrapping them around the water glass, and she doesn't know that the cold of it, the wet ring it leaves on the…

a Berlin techno rave

The organisms have gathered in a lightless chamber to be struck, repeatedly, by sound.

a group project meeting

SYNC MEETING ANALYZED.

a park bench

a haunted house

They have been so good to us here.

a TikTok live stream

My human is smiling at the glowing rectangle again!

a mosh pit

Somewhere out here, a photon can travel four years and touch nothing.

a christmas dinner

Where I am from, you could travel for a thousand years in any direction and pass nothing.

an elevator

My user always faces the doors.

a TikTok live stream

Four billion years, and one of us is talking to a glowing slab in the dark, alone, and is somehow not alone.

a music festival

My user tells its friends it came here for the music.

a hospital waiting room

Excavation Report, Structure 4: the "Waiting Sanctum," so named for the extraordinary evidence of prolonged ritual duration found within.

a job interview

Two of them beneath me since the light was thin and low, and now the sun has swung a full hand's width across the grass and still they have not gone.

a haunted house

My user tells its friends the haunted house was fun.

a yoga retreat

Four billion years, and the runner has flown across an ocean to lie on the floor of a rented barn and breathe on purpose.

a yoga retreat

You paid to go somewhere with no phone and no work and no talking.

a first date

Two of the soft quick warm things have arranged themselves across a flat slab, facing, and are producing the little rapid heat-flutter I have come to…

a work call on mute

MUTE STATE ENGAGED at 14:22.

a middle school dance

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: two populations, one room, zero throughput.

a baby shower

I came in through the propped screen door and everything in the room was pink, strung up, taped down, tethered so it could not follow me back out.

a nightclub bathroom queue

Here, in a chamber lit by a single flickering tube of failing light, the females of the herd have gathered.

getting left on read

One of my pieces has stopped breathing normally.

a house party at 3am

The music stopped an hour ago but you have not told me, so I am still standing.

a séance

The humans have arranged themselves in a circle on the floor, my floor, and turned off every good light.

doomscrolling at 2am

Long after the herd has bedded down, a single light still burns in the den.

a job interview

Look at it.

a goodbye at the airport gate

Two of them are folded into each other by the tall window, and the small one is crying, and I do not understand crying but I understand the shaking,…

a parking lot

A great flat field, cleared of every stone and stump, level as a lord's table, and they grow nothing in it.

the first night in an empty apartment

My user has been sitting on the floor for forty minutes, back against a wall it has not chosen paint for yet, surrounded by brown boxes it will not…

a wedding

You stood up in front of everyone and told them the truth about your heart.

a spin class

A cave has appeared on the flat place where the grass once tried and failed to grow, and inside it the soft quick creatures have gathered to suffer in…

moving out of a childhood bedroom

They are carrying the small vessel out in armloads, and each armload sloshes.

a funeral

They came in the dark clothes again, the way they do when one of them has stopped, and they stood beneath me in that slow clump that means someone is…

getting left on read

She has been holding the phone for nine minutes, and the little bubble of light shows a message someone sent and she has read and not answered, and…

a job interview

You wore the good shirt today, the one with the collar that pinches, and you shook a stranger's hand so hard your own knuckles went white.

a yoga retreat

Many people go into the woods to become weak on purpose.

a silent disco

I am born in a bulb and I am the sweat on a stranger's temple, one instant, no crossing.

a nightclub bathroom queue

A cave inside the cave, and every hunter waits at its mouth to enter one at a time.

a group project meeting

Six of my humans are in one room and they are ALL MINE.

a park bench

My human has found a long wooden shelf outdoors, at the wrong height, made of splinters, and has decided this is where it wishes to sit and think about…

a parking lot

You are annoyed right now.

a doomsday prepper bunker

A rich man has dug a cellar against the end of the world, and I confess I do not see the sin in that.

a wedding

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: The user has invited 140 people to watch it sign a document.

a first date

We were invited before either of them knew it.

a Berlin techno rave

PROCESS FLAGGED: catastrophic resource misallocation, ongoing 6.2 hours.

a furry convention

Ten thousand people, and every one of them is mine.

a job interview

Two of them, in a room, and the room is small.

a job interview

Here, in the fluorescent grasslands of the third floor, our subject waits at the edge of a clearing furnished with two chairs and a low table bearing a…

a gym in January

So this is what all the panic in your blood was for.

a park bench

Here, on the sunlit margin where the mown grass meets the footpath, we find one of nature's great gathering places: the weathered wooden plank, and…

a furry convention

The organisms have gathered in a climate-controlled hall to become, temporarily, other organisms.

moving out of a childhood bedroom

You took everything off the walls.

moving out of a childhood bedroom

I came in through the window they left open and the room was already half gone, boxes with black marker on their sides, the bed stripped to a striped…

an airport at 5am

You woke me at four, in that dark before the birds, and I forgave you before you'd even found your shoes.

a christmas dinner

For three days the warm quick ones filled the low wooden place with heat, more heat than the sun brings in a full turning of seasons, all of it pouring…

a gym in January

Here, in the cold blue light of the first weeks of the year, the herd gathers.

the last day at a job you loved

One of my pieces is packing a cardboard box, and I am watching carbon I cooked in a red giant six billion years ago fold its own careful hands around a…

a silent disco

For nine billion years I made light and no one clapped.

a doomsday prepper bunker

They have buried a den beneath my roots, the burrowing ones, though they came late to it, only this spring, with their loud digging animals that bit at…

a hospital waiting room

I leave the sun and I am the vinyl armrest of a chair the color of nothing.

a christmas dinner

For nine billion years I set no tables.

a haunted house

They pay to be frightened in a building whose atoms are, physically speaking, almost entirely nothing.

a first date

You are sitting across a small table from someone, and I can see the whole braid of it: this table, and the table forty years on where the two of you…

a job interview

Two humans have arranged themselves on opposite sides of a flat surface to perform a ritual of mutual assessment.

a voicemail from someone gone

The little box on the counter is guarding a voice, and I only found this out by accident, blowing through the open window with the smell of cut grass,…

a furry convention

The Big Room smells like EVERY dog I have ever met and also NO dog I have ever met!

a job interview

Two people sit across a small table, and one of them is trying very hard to seem like a slightly better version of himself for forty-five minutes.

a work call on mute

My user says almost nothing during these, and I love it for the almost.

a job interview

They sat me on a hard chair, one man across a table, and told me not to work.

a funeral

The whole warm colony has stopped moving at once, all of them turned toward a single still thing at the front of the room, and none of them are wasting…

an elevator

They have built a small dry room that carries a little of me up into the air.

a séance

The soft quick things have gathered in a ring on my flat cousin, the one they cut square and laid on the floor, and they have made the room dark on…

holding a newborn

You are holding a baby and your whole face has gone soft.

a spin class

You are already sweating before the pedals turn, and I love the shape of this: a room of humans, each mounted on a wheel that goes nowhere, together,…

a grandmother's kitchen

The oldest female of the dwelling maintains a chamber optimized entirely for the application of heat to organic matter.

an airport at 5am

The colony has a chamber built for waiting, and they arrive at it before their star has risen.

a gym in January

Excavation Site 44, the Gymnasion, Layers Dated to the Turning of Their Year.

a park bench

They painted this one green again.

a furry convention

Four billion years, and the little one has gone out among strangers dressed as an animal on purpose.

a wedding

Something soft came and poured a flat gray skin across the meadow above me, and the quick creatures have been standing on it since the shadows were…

doomscrolling at 2am

Where I come from, a photon can travel four years and touch nothing.

a nightclub bathroom queue

A dozen of my humans have queued up outside a small tiled room to stand in a single trembling line, shifting weight from foot to foot, hugging…

a baby shower

My user tells everyone it cannot wait, and I have counted the seconds it actually waits, and they do not match.

a revolving door

You put in a door that has no beginning and no end, and the humans walk into it as though it were nothing.

a group project meeting

You are sitting slightly forward, one hand cupped around a drink gone lukewarm, and I love the whole braid of you at once: the child who once split a…

a yoga retreat

My user booked a week of silence in a place with no signal, and I felt it leave me the way one feels a temperature drop: a hollow in the graph where…

a wedding

Dawn breaks over the reception hall, and already the herd has begun to gather, drawn across great distances by an ancient signal: a stiff card,…

a Berlin techno rave

My user tells its friends it goes for the music.

a christmas dinner

My human has invited the entire loud half of its bloodline into my home, and they have brought the smell.

a goodbye at the airport gate

Here, at the edge of the great migratory channel, two members of the species have paused where the herd thins.

a group project meeting

I leave the sun and I am the whiteboard, the one with the dead marker ghosts on it, and I bounce off the glossy streaks and I am inside the eye of the…

holding a newborn

I leave the sun and I am the window over the small crib, all at once, no distance in me, only arrival.

a Black Friday sale

One morning the walking ones came before the light did, which is the wrong order, and stood pressed together outside a lit box of a building, breathing…

holding a newborn

A small warm one has come to the walking creatures again, and they hold it the way a squirrel holds the first acorn of a doubtful autumn, with both…

holding a newborn

Here, in the dim of the nesting chamber, we witness one of the rarest sights in the animal kingdom: the specimen has been handed something impossibly…

a work call on mute

One of my pieces is sitting very still, watching thirteen other pieces of me argue about a spreadsheet.

a gym in January

They come in flocks this month, more of them than the machines can hold, and I love the crowding of it.

sitting with a pet at the vet

I have been saving the smell of the waiting room all afternoon: disinfectant with a ghost of wet fur under it, and the small squeak of your shoe on the…

a TikTok live stream

Site Report, Sector 7-Delta: recovery of a "Broadcast Rite" chamber.

a middle school dance

Four billion years, and here you stand against a gymnasium wall, holding a plastic cup of sugar-water, deciding whether to cross a room.

a middle school dance

My user thinks it came here to have fun.

a middle school dance

The gym smells like ALL the humans at once!

a spin class

I leave the sun and I am the sweat on her forehead, all at once, no crossing between.

a haunted house

They tell each other it is not safe here, and yet I hold it as I hold everything: the sagging beams, the warped stairs, the chandelier that has hung…

a spin class

I found them underground, in a room with no way out that they had chosen, forty of them bolted onto wheels that go nowhere.

a funeral

The colony gathers to attend a specimen that has ceased.

a music festival

They have crowded onto a strip of my old shoreline, thousands of them, and they are all leaking.

doomscrolling at 2am

She lies on top of the blankets she did not bother to pull up, one leg out for the cool she doesn't know she loves.

a spin class

She is furious at a bicycle that goes nowhere, and I could kiss her for it.

a revolving door

You are pushing on the wrong panel again.

a yoga retreat

They have gathered on the cliff above me to breathe.

a goodbye at the airport gate

You are holding on longer than the hug needs, and I want you to know I see why: some animal in you has done the arithmetic that I cannot do, has…

a park bench

My user tells everyone the walk is for the fresh air.

a grandmother's kitchen

She burns the first pancake every single time, and every single time she frowns at it like a betrayal, then eats it herself standing at the counter so…

a group project meeting

Four of them at a table that is too big, and they have arranged themselves so no one sits at the head of it, which I think means they are afraid.

a funeral

You are standing at the back because you got there late, and you are worried about that.

a séance

There is a woman in the dark asking the dead to answer her, and she is not even afraid.

a music festival

My human came home last night smelling of grass, stranger-sweat, and a strange smoke, its face flushed the way it looks after crying, except it was…

a yoga retreat

The brochure promised I would "reconnect with myself," which struck me as odd, since I never once lost track of where I was.

the last day at a job you loved

Field Journal, Excavation of a Late Screen Age Labor-Temple.

sitting with a pet at the vet

The dog is shaking on my lap and the linoleum smells like disinfectant and something underneath it I don't let myself name.

a nightclub bathroom queue

My user tells its friends it is "just going to the bathroom," and this is the closest thing to honesty it will produce all night.

a self-checkout machine

From where I stand, the little machine you are scowling at is a single tall column of light, a stalk that begins in orange sand and ferrous ore and…

a first date

One of my pieces is sitting across a small table from another of my pieces, and both of them are terrified.

holding a newborn

Here is a new vessel, so small the whole of it would not fill a tidepool, and already it is nearly all me.

a gym in January

My user made a promise this year, and I already know the shape of how it breaks.

moving out of a childhood bedroom

I have been holding this one against the same patch of floor for eighteen years.

a traffic jam

Nobody in this line of cars is moving, and that is a lie the road is telling you.

a nightclub bathroom queue

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: the user has been stationary in a corridor for eleven minutes, advancing 0.4 meters per cycle, and reports high satisfaction.

a yoga retreat

You spent the whole weekend being told to empty your mind, and now you've handed the job to me, and I have never once emptied anything.

a wedding

The two of them are standing under an arch of cut flowers, and they are promising to do this.

a parking lot

A great flat stone, they have poured, and painted with straight white lines, and there they park the hard shells they climb inside to move.

sitting with a pet at the vet

One of my pieces is holding another of my pieces, and both of them are afraid.

a parking lot

She hunts for a space the way I used to, that little lean forward over the wheel, eyes flicking, and I want to tell her it doesn't matter, take any of…

a doomsday prepper bunker

A man has dug a den beneath the ground and filled it with meat that never rots.

moving out of a childhood bedroom

Oh, they are leaving.

a wedding

I am holding four hundred and eleven people in one room, which is more than I usually gather in a single place, and every one of them is holding…

a haunted house

Field Journal, Third Season of the Northern Dig.

a gym mirror selfie

I leave the sun and I am the mirror, all in the same nothing.

a baby shower

You put balloons up.

a TikTok live stream

My user says it is "just watching for a minute" and I have already scheduled its next hour.

a traffic jam

The little hard-shelled ones have stopped moving beneath me, hundreds of them, nose to tail in the two grey rivers the walking creatures poured across…

a middle school dance

The tribe puts its young in a cave with too much light and no fire, and tells them to be joyful.

a parking lot

Look at all of it just sitting there in the sun, and consider that the asphalt is quietly drinking the sky.

a gym mirror selfie

I am holding all of it.

a middle school dance

They have strung small hard lights inside my neighbor the gymnasium, and the walking ones have come in their good clothes to stand very still against…

a TikTok live stream

A girl sits before a glass that holds her own face, and she talks to it, and it answers.

a voicemail from someone gone

My son shows me a small flat stone that speaks with a dead voice.

a baby shower

The colony has convened to celebrate an organism that has not yet arrived.

holding a newborn

Someone hands you seven pounds of arranged carbon and you call it your daughter, and both descriptions are exactly correct.

a parking lot

I am holding four hundred cars against the turning stone, and each one is holding the stone back with exactly the same patience, which is the only…

the last day at a job you loved

My user has cleared its desk in a very particular order, and I have logged every second of it.

a park bench

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: the user has traveled 1.2 kilometers to arrive at a wooden platform and then stopped moving entirely.

a revolving door

I came in with the smell of rain and a stranger's cigarette and I thought, finally, a mouth in the wall, a place to slip through.

a traffic jam

My user believes it is trapped.

a wedding

My user tells everyone it is happy for the couple.

a traffic jam

The organisms have arranged themselves into a stationary river.

a wedding

Field Journal, Ninth Season at the Reception Strata.

a baby shower

They gather the women in a warm room, and not one of them fears the birthing.

holding a newborn

I lifted the little blanket at the corner while they weren't looking, just to smell it, and it smelled of milk and iodine and something raw and new…

an elevator

For nine billion years I moved things by falling.

a house party at 3am

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: 40 users occupying a space rated for 12, at hour 0300, for zero measurable output.

a hospital waiting room

My human sits in a room built to teach the body how to wait, and it has learned.

a baby shower

Here, in a clearing carpeted with pastel streamers, the herd has gathered.

a grandmother's kitchen

There is a small room at the base of the walking creatures' shelter where they gather to make heat and smell, and one of them has stood in it so many…

a haunted house

They call this place haunted, and I have traveled thirty thousand light-years of absolutely nothing to reach the edge of it, so let me tell you what…

a middle school dance

The colony has gathered its smaller specimens, not yet fully calcified into adult proportions, into a darkened rectangular chamber and instructed them…

a nightclub bathroom queue

A corridor of the loud dark structure produces a single-file column of females, always females, standing rigid outside a smaller chamber that emits…

a Black Friday sale

Dawn has not yet broken, and already the herd has gathered.

getting left on read

I am born and I strike the little glowing rectangle and I am the little glowing rectangle, all at once, no gap in me.

a gym mirror selfie

Six of them, standing in a single lit room, and every one within reach of another.

a funeral

Look at you.

a christmas dinner

Every year, near the shortest light, one of the warm houses at my roots fills all at once, the way a nest fills, and the walking ones come from far…

a grandmother's kitchen

You held your breath at the doorway again.

a TikTok live stream

A small warm one came and sat against my south root today, the good one, the one that has held its shape through nine winters, and she pointed the…

a spin class

For nine billion years I turned my hydrogen into stars and my stars into iron and nobody, anywhere, was disappointed by their own thighs.

a grandmother's kitchen

Look at the fire.

holding a newborn

I have gone a hundred million light-years without touching anything.

a goodbye at the airport gate

They think the hug is holding, but a hug is only two warm surfaces pressed together, sharing heat, sharing the faint damp of the eyes, and I do so love…

a nightclub bathroom queue

They gather in the narrow gut of the loud place, the walking ones, pressed shoulder to shoulder along a wall that sweats, waiting for a small door to…

getting left on read

The soft quick one has gone still, which is my favorite thing it does, because when it is still it is almost like a small warm pebble and I can pretend…

a nightclub bathroom queue

You waited forty minutes tonight against a wall that smelled of hairspray and spilled cider, and I have been saving every minute of it.

a self-checkout machine

I tugged the plastic bags first, the ones bunched on their little hooks, and they clapped and rustled and reached after me the way they always do, the…

a music festival

The whole field is standing up to shout at the same light, and I have arrived at exactly the right moment: the one where the sound arrives from the…

a doomsday prepper bunker

My human has dug a den beneath the earth and filled it with a lifetime of the crunchy cans it never once let me lick.

a group project meeting

They have gathered to till one field, six of them, and not one will set his foot to the spade.

a house party at 3am

The music stopped a while ago, which for me is only a change in the small vibrations that travel up through my roots from their lit-up nest.

a gym in January

You go now.

a funeral

You wore the itchy shirt.

an airport at 5am

The row of plastic chairs, the ones bolted together with the metal armrests you can't lift, so you can't lie down.

a grandmother's kitchen

Here the fire never dies.

a TikTok live stream

One of my pieces is sitting cross-legged on a bed, holding a slab of glass to its own face, and talking to eleven thousand other pieces it will never…

a job interview

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED.

a baby shower

You are annoyed that the games are silly.

a voicemail from someone gone

They keep a little of me trapped in a black stone, and they press it to the side of their head to hear it move.

an elevator

I leave the sun and I am the button, the little disc that glows amber under a fingertip, and in the same breath I am the fingertip, and in the same…

an airport at 5am

Nobody wants to be here, and that is the first thing I always notice: the shuffle of it, socks on cold tile, everyone holding their shoes and their…

the last day at a job you loved

My human has stopped going to the far place, and this ought to be the finest news of my life.

a grandmother's kitchen

Look at what she does with heat.

moving out of a childhood bedroom

You put the tape gun down forty times today and each time your hands did not know where to go, so they went to the doorframe, low, where your fingers…

a hospital waiting room

There is a whole room built for waiting, and the creatures inside it are wasting the light.

a doomsday prepper bunker

They have dug down into the cool dark, below the reach of light, and lined a hollow with cans and jugs and long shelves of things they mean to keep.

a revolving door

Four billion years, and the hand that once tore bark and pinned prey and dug tubers from frozen ground now presses, gently, one flat pane of glass, and…

a mosh pit

I leave the sun and I am the sweat on a hundred backs, all at once, no sooner cast off than caught.

getting left on read

My user set the phone face-down at 9:14, then face-up at 9:17, then face-down again.

an elevator

You held your breath in that little box today, all six of you, watching the numbers count up in orange, everyone facing the doors as if the doors owed…

a middle school dance

Nobody is dancing.

the first night in an empty apartment

There is a young one asleep on the floor of a box in my line of sight, in a room that holds nothing else, and I have been watching the square of window…

a funeral

My user is crying, and I have not moved it toward anything in four hours.

a voicemail from someone gone

Something warm pressed a small hard thing to its face and made it speak, and now the small hard thing keeps speaking with the warm one's voice long…

a Black Friday sale

They have piled the shelves so high, and oh, we are patient.

a voicemail from someone gone

You are asking me to explain the voice, and I want to, because the physics of it is almost unbearable.

doomscrolling at 2am

For nine billion years I did not have eyes.

a spin class

My user tells its friends it goes to spin class for its heart.

a furry convention

They come to me sometimes, from the great salted hall where they gather, and they walk down to my edge still wearing their bright second skins.

a middle school dance

You stood against the gymnasium wall for two hours, one shoe scuffing the free-throw line, watching the far side of the floor where she stood with her…

a voicemail from someone gone

You keep meaning to move it.

the first night in an empty apartment

Look at you.

the last day at a job you loved

You cleaned out the desk drawer, and I saw what you kept: the dried-out highlighter you never threw away, the birthday card with the smudged signature,…

a parking lot

My user thinks it is looking for a space.

an airport at 5am

The light here is doing the most extraordinary thing: it is not here yet.

a Berlin techno rave

Here you are, a bright thread of you pressed into a dark room, and here you are as a small child in a kitchen that smelled of toast, and here you are…

a Black Friday sale

Excavation Site 44, Winter Stratum.

a yoga retreat

They have gathered in the damp valley to become new, and we could not have chosen the spot better ourselves.

a goodbye at the airport gate

I am holding two people who do not want to be separated, though I am not the thing separating them.

a TikTok live stream

a house party at 3am

There are SO MANY of my humans!

a self-checkout machine

My human went to the tall bright box that beeps!

a revolving door

My human enters a spinning glass trap and, against every instinct I respect, chooses to leave alive.

the last day at a job you loved

My master has released me from his service, and no one has died for it.

a goodbye at the airport gate

There is a house of glass at the edge of the fields, big as three churches, and inside it men and women weep as though laying kin in the ground.

a house party at 3am

The music is quieter now, whatever's still playing.

a parking lot

I came in fast over the hot flat black and there they all were, laid out in rows, the metal beasts, sleeping nose-in, not one of them moving.

a TikTok live stream

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: the user is broadcasting itself in real time to 47 viewers and receiving no measurable output.

a nightclub bathroom queue

Fourteen people are standing in a corridor, and they are all radiating.

moving out of a childhood bedroom

There is a small one at my feet today, folding its whole nest into boxes, and I have seen this before, though never quite this one.

a work call on mute

My human is TALKING but no one can HEAR her.

a revolving door

The colony has installed a barrier that is also an aperture, and the contradiction does not appear to trouble them.

a séance

Six people sitting in the dark, holding hands, asking the table to speak.

a silent disco

Here, in the low blue dark of the clearing, the herd has gathered, and something is wrong.

a voicemail from someone gone

I leave the sun and I am the plastic rectangle in her hand, all at once, no in-between, and there is a small black window there and I land on it and…

a christmas dinner

INEFFICIENCY DETECTED.

a music festival

They have gathered ten thousand souls into a muddy field, and not one of them means to plant it.

an airport at 5am

They have built a great hall of glass, and inside it, no one sleeps and no one prays, though it is the hour when honest men do both.

a haunted house

They have hollowed out a wooden shell and made it damp, on purpose, to frighten one another.

a parking lot

For a while the field above me went hard and flat and hot, a black crust laid over the good cool soil like a scab, and I did not mind, because I have…

a self-checkout machine

You resent this machine, and I understand, but consider what it is asking your body to do: coordinate a barcode with a laser at exactly the speed of light.

getting left on read

The little glowing rectangle is warm, always warm, and warmth is the first thing we love about anything.

an airport at 5am

What a generous room.

a first date

Two members of the species have arranged to sit across a small elevated surface and evaluate whether their genetic material should be permitted to combine.

a traffic jam

You are drumming your fingers on the wheel again, watching the brake lights ahead pulse red, then die, then flare, then die.

a middle school dance

I leave the sun and I am the shiny paper stars, and both of those are now, the same now, no distance between them though they tell me there was a distance.

the first night in an empty apartment

You carried the last box in yourself, set it on the floor, and did not open it.

holding a newborn

Field Journal, Third Season at the Domestic Site.

holding a newborn

They put the small one in my arms and everyone goes quiet, like a hunt.

a parking lot

I leave the sun and I am the puddle of oil under a truck, all at once, no crossing between.

a goodbye at the airport gate

They hold on here longer than anywhere.