Wet Wood Outside My Door

The shop owner called Im my sister. She said it the way people say it when they mean nothing by it — warm, ordinary, the small talk of an ordinary afternoon. I stood at the counter holding the steel ruler I had walked in for, and my hand did not move, and my face did not move, because I have spent years training my face not to move.

Im sat at that counter. Im signed my points box. Im gave the woman my phone number, which the woman has had for three years, and the woman believed her. That is the part I cannot stop circling: the woman believed her. Somewhere on a loyalty card is Im's handwriting pressed against the number I recite to doctors and delivery apps and my mother on Sundays. The handwriting is prettier than mine.

I came home and the doorman asked why I left my fiddle-leaf fig in the hallway overnight. I had. I forgot. There was a fresh water ring on the parquet that had not been there the night before. Im exited my building at 11:42 a.m. I photographed all of it under the bathroom lamp, because that is the only light in my flat that does not lie. The hallway one is too kind.

I filed the supplemental online. I called Yu-jin on speaker and she was measured in the way she always is when the law is the only useful language. She said corroboration is a word judges like. She did not say it would be enough. I wrote a new line in the skyline notebook in red ink, which I have never used before, and I watered my own fig.