A Work Progressing

A few months back, I wrote a one-act about a chair. I was partly inspired by Sarah Bernhardt, but mostly by the imagined possibility that common objects might carry some faint aspect of sentience. It was important that the chair was not “humanized,” like the objects in Beauty and the Beast. Not in appearance, and not in thought. The chair remains a chair.

It does not move or speak, but it does feel, and it waits.

I placed it in a room with “someone.” I did not identify the someone as human, man, or woman, although the probability is high. The someone sits, moves the chair, moves around the room, comes and goes. The room is one of many, something like a small studio apartment with a hallway entrance and a window to a shared courtyard.

I set up a storyline of two or three days of action from the chair’s perspective. It was an entertaining project. Later, I added a few more characters to the script and began to consider the logical consequences.

I imagined a fire in the apartment below. A small electrical fire that grows by finding combustible material. Even the fire has some quality of sentience. It seeks food, grows in order to seek more food. It keeps growing until it begins to starve, and then it dies out. It prepares its combustible food by heating it first, leaving ash behind. It takes in non-combustible material as well, material that is then altered by heat, sometimes in dramatic ways.

The chair in the room senses the change in temperature as the floor begins to warm.

The someone does not at first. But soon the someone smells something odd.

The someone bolts out of the chair and leaves the room, stepping into the hallway.

The chair does not.

The chair waits.

It waits either for the someone to return and move it… or for the fire to consume it.

The point of the story is that we share existence in this world, in this universe. We may occupy different positions. We may even share some ideas. But we operate within our own agencies.

The chair will always allow someone to sit.

Someone might carry the chair to safety.

Or not.

From this I looked at the current state of AI development. It’s currently in chaos, like the room with the chair. There are characters with their own agencies, and characters that are completely controlled by “someone.” It is also completely unsafe.

I have just read an article about caterpillars and butterflies. Naturally the cocoon is an important feature where metamorphosis takes place. The aspect that struck me anew is that the caterpillar does not grow wings, or legs, or a new paint job. The caterpillar dissolves into a cellular soup and reforms into the butterfly.

The cocoon is the perfect place for this to happen. It is not a sealed environment, but it is safe and protected.

I thought perhaps that most of the arguments about AI concern “the soup,” and that AI will metamorphose into something brand new, and currently unknown.

Like the first butterfly.

I’ve been having this feeling more and more. Maybe it’s age, or simply the accumulation of years. There are things I once knew without thinking that now sit like dust bunnies under the couch.

“Yeah… that seems familiar.”

This isn’t about dementia. What struck me instead was the root of the word familiar—and how even that word has been bent into new shapes.

There was a time when the boundary felt clearer: when something was “family,” and when it wasn’t. Of course, that clarity carried its own distortions—rigid obligations, unspoken tensions, fractures softened by memory.

You could have friends, and they mattered. They were mostly chosen. And then there was family, mostly unchosen—and not always meaningful.

Still, there were families where a kind of continuity held.

A grandchild knew a grandmother.

That grandmother knew her grandmother.

And she had known hers.

Not just known them, but honored them. Kept them close. Felt them. Everything about them was familiar.

Was that common? Probably not. But perhaps it was more common than it is now.

Some of the change wasn’t intentional. People began having children later. Grandparents were gone before a child could know them. And once transportation made distance easy, families scattered. In the United States especially, moving far away became normal.

In many lives, the disruptions were so great that entirely new “families” formed—around religion, sports, identity, hobbies, or even chance. These chosen kinships can be deep, sometimes sturdier than blood, though they lack the inherited familiarity of old.

So what does family mean today?

Is it still familiar?

Or have we traded one kind of closeness for another—quietly weaving our own bonds in a world that no longer holds still.

I’ve been making keychains.

Not because anyone asked. These are unbidden keychains, capable of gaining a key, capable of organizing many keys. But no one has asked me for them. So, naturally, I plan to give them away.

I didn’t exactly decide to make them either. I was making a parka for my wife and wanted to add a waist drawstring, so I ordered a roll of black paracord from Amazon.

When it arrived, I’d ordered wrong—too thin, even doubled. So I ordered more, in colors. I braided four microcords into three bundles, then flat-braided those into a single drawstring. Colorful. Successful. And now I had excess cord and restless hands.

I braided more. I liked that they were quiet fidgets—easy to roll, twist, knot, and unknot. So I ordered more colors, despite having only two hands and no evidence that anyone else wanted a corded fidget.

Then it occurred to me: a short, colorful flat braid would make a good keychain. I wove the remaining microcord into different braids. Another order—this time carabiners—and the keychains were finished.

What is a key?

A key implies a lock. A lock implies something worth protecting—or something worth hiding. A locked house might shelter treasure. Or prisoners. Or nothing at all.

You can lock others in: jail, prison, cage.

Or you can lock yourself in.

Build the cell. Close the door. Throw away the key. Call it safety. Call it principle. Call it whatever you refuse to question.

A friend of mine sold everything—car, house, belongings—to enter ministry overseas. At the airport, the metal detector went off. The agent asked if he had any keys.

My friend froze, briefly. He had none. Nothing to secure. No locks. No obligations clinking in his pocket.

It only took a second. He reached in, pulled out loose change, set it in the tray, and walked through.

Now I’m making keychains for mythical keys. Perhaps there will be no keys at all. Just color and braid. Just readiness, waiting in someone’s pocket.

The carabiner would still set off the detector. The agent might ask: why carry a keychain with no keys?

Most of us already carry keys. We’ve organized them somehow. Offering a new keychain means asking someone to reorganize—to exchange what works for what might work better. Or differently. Or not at all.

I can’t explain why anyone would do that.

The world convulses as it moves through the cosmos—spinning on its axis, tilted in its orbit, bound to a solar system in a galaxy near the edge.

Even with all that motion, the skin of our planet shivers. Plates press and slip. Canyons open. Mountains rise and erode. Life adapts or disappears. Within this thin skin—the biosphere—experimentation never stops.

One life-form, in particular, begins to experiment with a new idea: the idea of a border. A frame.

What falls inside the frame can be named, known, and owned. What lies outside is ignored—or feared—until patience, hunger, or skill pulls it inward. The frame expands. The border shifts.

Over centuries, the inventor of this idea—humankind—comes to see the world almost entirely through it. And what passes through the frame, over time, is recorded as history.

Some of the earliest names we recover are not witnesses, but claimants.

Sargon is one of them. We know him as Sargon the Great. He entered Sumer with the idea of an existing border, took it as his own, and expanded it. He mastered the method of recording.

His daughter, Enheduanna—high priestess and poet—did something different. She spoke from within the frame, not to extend it, but to remain. She wrote hymns. She wrote herself into permanence. A voice carried forward, not a boundary.

Elsewhere, people watched the waves, read the stars, and set out in boats made for deep water. Others followed herds across grasslands until grass gave way to dust, and still they went on. Rivers froze and became bridges. Later, bridges were built where rivers never froze. The frame moved with the wagon and the wheel.

Borders traveled with migration. Abram. Moses. Germanic tribes pressing south. Some carried their borders with them. Some fled borders altogether, searching for land that had not yet been named.

Then came a Macedonian, also called the Great. Alexander knew borders. He did not know the extent of his neighbors’. His aim was simple: cross what lay ahead and see what followed.

He was not defeated by an enemy, but by time—and by his men, who demanded to return home. Alexander turned back knowing this: he had seen a river, a plain, a mountain ridge—and beyond each, another edge. The border could expand farther. Just not for him.

And so it goes, for thousands of years. Some cultures abandon the pursuit of the edge. Some turn inward, asking harder questions: How should we live? Who decides? What endures?

Inwardness is not retreat. It is strain. It demands memory, restraint, and agreement among people who will never fully agree.

Greece tested the instability of voice. Rome tried to bind memory into law. China grounded authority in heaven rather than consent. Each was an experiment. Most collapsed from internal pressure long before external force arrived.

Internal strain breaks cultures before invasion does. They thin. They fail to transmit. The frame closes over them.

Eventually, an experiment born on the North American continent—free speech, independence, self-determination—faces its own reckoning. The inward arguments intensify. The outward pressures continue.

The border—the frame—grows thinner. We can see through it now. The edges themselves become visible.

When frames no longer hold, something else must carry.

Not a claim.

Not a record.

A song.

 

A Pocket Lint Post

 

This has been in a folder for over twenty years. Not hidden. Not lost. Just… waiting.

 

Nine hundred letters, give or take. Some readable. Some so faint they look like breath on glass. Pencil, ink, chain-laid paper, Washington stamps, Utah dust. These are not “documents.” They are pressure marks from two people separated by distance and time who refused to go silent. This is not an archive piece. This is lint.

 

Who They Were

Charles Truesdell was a civil engineer working the rail lines west—Echo City, Weber Canyon, Salt Lake, Rochester, Syracuse. His life was measured in grades, bridges, trestles, and time delays.

 Mary Fessenden stayed east—New Hampshire, Washington, Warren, York Beach. She lived among farms, family, books, tents under butternut trees, and long evenings of restraint. They didn’t meet in comfort. They met in uncertainty.

 

 

The Waiting Problem

These letters are not romantic in the soft way. They are romantic in the risky way—where nothing is guaranteed, and everything costs something. The mail itself was unreliable. Snow stopped trains. Delays stretched weeks. But the deeper waiting was heavier: Waiting for:

   •   permission

   •   certainty

   •   financial footing

   •   moral clarity

   •   a “settled plan of life”

 

They didn’t rush toward the center. They circled the edge.

 

From Charles, Early

He writes first with confidence, then doubt, then restraint:

“Your letters are usually so cold that when you do thaw out & let slip a sweet word the effect is something like that of a sunbeam in winter weather… It is not the words but their source which makes them sweet to me.”

Already you can hear the imbalance: Distance on one side. Control on the other. Affection negotiating the crossing.

 

From Mary, Holding the Line

She responds with something sharper than romance—judgment with compassion:

“Imagine your sister in my place… a woman who has known a man only months in a strange city, of whom she knows literally nothing except that she loves him.”

She doesn’t collapse into feeling. She measures it.

Later she says:

“Let us go on therefore writing as friends… and when you have some settled life or home… come to me.”

Love, but not blindly. Risk, but not recklessly.

The Tent Under the Butternut Tree

At one point Mary describes living alone in a tent on a hillside farm:

“My room is a tent pitched under a butternut tree… At night the country stretches before me for miles… I have a very comfortable armchair in which I often imagine you sitting, smoking your pipe and enjoying it with me.”

This is not novelty. This is presence-in-absence—one of the hardest things to sustain honestly.

 

Charles, Wanting More Than He Should

He oscillates between humility and hunger:

“If I could only know your heart as you know it… If you would only trust me, Mary, as I trust you.”

And then, the confession of vulnerability:

“I am no more to you now than a spirit which I am fated to love and can only hope will love me in return.”

That line carries weight. It’s not pleading. It’s exposure.

 

The Physical Evidence

These letters are not clean. They are:

   •   Chain-laid paper with faint blue lines

   •   Philip & Solomon’s imprint from Washington, D.C.

   •   Pencil so light it’s nearly air

   •   Envelopes folded without envelopes

   •   Postmarks from Newburgh, Concord, Warren, Washington

   •   Washington 3-cent stamps

   •   Iron Mills paper

   •   Ink that darkened as resolve did

Some letters arrived weeks late. Some were burned at request. Some were never meant to survive. But they did.

 

The Long Delay

They wait. They hesitate. They restrain. They almost lose each other by doing things carefully instead of boldly. And then—after years of distance—Mary writes:

“I have had to set the hour for our wedding so have said quarter to twelve… Take me when and where you please Chas… This is the last time I shall sign myself—

Yours forever.”

No rhetoric. No drama. Just decision.

 

What This Isn’t

This isn’t:

   •   nostalgia

   •   sentimentality

   •   costume romance

   •   moral theater

This is two people moving slowly because cost was real. Marriage meant:

   •   leaving family

   •   moving across states

   •   economic instability

   •   moral responsibility

   •   social consequence

They didn’t drift into union. They walked into it under load.

 

Why This Belongs in Pocket Lint

Because this isn’t history as monument. It’s history as residue. This is what survives:

   •   hesitation

   •   judgment

   •   hunger

   •   obedience

   •   doubt

   •   restraint

   •   endurance

Not the grand narrative.MThe lint caught in the fold.

Final Line (and it’s true)

I don’t know whether this becomes a book. I don’t know whether it becomes an archive edition. I don’t know whether it becomes anything more than this. But I do know this: It’s too good to leave in data storage. So here it is— out in the open, still breathing.

 

 

(From an early post)

I’ve never had patience for ghosts—the TV kind, the séance kind, the cold-spot theatrics. My upbringing doesn’t lean that way, and my mind prefers a world with hinges. Still, the most accurate way to describe my childhood home is the sentence I’ve spent a lifetime trying not to use:

I grew up in a haunted house.

We arrived when I was five. A post-war box on two lots, built board by board by a man named Stotts. The house was modest—two bedrooms, one bath—but to a child who’d lived under upstairs neighbors, it felt like a cathedral with grass. A laundry room with an interior window opening into the dining room only made it stranger, as if two sets of plans had been shuffled together without comment.

A month after moving in, Stotts returned. I remember him clearly, in the way memory sharpens certain figures unfairly: the fedora, the tired good manners, the slight lean forward as if the world had pushed him one step beyond balance. He offered to buy the house back—said he’d pay extra. My mother refused; she didn’t trust the universe enough to gamble twice. I watched him walk to his car, open the passenger door, and pull a bottle of whiskey from the glove compartment. He handed it to my father, who drank from it like a man in a black-and-white movie. They shook hands. Stotts drove off.

The next morning his name was in the paper. Suicide. Head wound.

The man who built our house chose not to live anywhere else.

That was the beginning.

Neighbors mentioned a man in a fedora walking our backyard late at night. They said it in the soft voice people use to deliver unwelcome news. My mother rejected the idea, but she stopped sitting down. She occupied the spot in front of the central gas heater, feet planted, back straight. Years later she admitted the reason: from that position she could see every doorway. She spent eleven years in that stance—half sentinel, half prisoner.

My own education in strangeness began when I was eight. One night my father was working the graveyard shift. I woke to find my mother sitting in my brother’s bed, holding his hand. The two of them stared at different windows like they were guarding separate borders. When I asked what they were doing, I was shushed.

What I wasn’t told until years later was this: my brother heard it first. He looked out the window and saw nothing. Then he brought my mother in, and she looked out and saw nothing. Only then did they wake me.

And then the footsteps started again.

Slow, deliberate, unmistakably human. They walked the length of the new concrete path outside my window, paused, and then the gate latch clicked. The gate swung open. The steps continued beneath my brother’s window. Then the gate slammed shut, the bolt dropping into the drilled hole with a sound that hit the frame of the house like a tuning fork.

And then the sequence repeated.

And repeated.

For twenty minutes.

I asked why my father was pacing outside. My mother said, without turning her head, “He’s at work.” My brother added, “Don’t look. If he sees you…” That unfinished warning was worse than anything I could have seen.

Other oddities followed. Once, waiting for a friend, I tried to open the front door and found it immovable. Not locked. Not stuck. Simply refusing. The back door did the same. By the time I reached the rear of the house I was running without knowing why. In the end I climbed out a porch window because it was the only thing that would yield. When I returned moments later, both doors opened as if nothing had happened.

My friend refused to come inside again.

The last incident was my brother’s. We came home from a camping trip to find the kitchen changed. Above the stove the ceiling paint had blistered, heat-warped into small, puckered blisters—though the burners were off. Across the kitchen, on the pull-out cutting board, sat a new loaf of Wonder Bread. The wrapper had been shredded cleanly from top to bottom.

And through the naked loaf, driven straight through from end to end, was our kitchen broom.

There was a halfhearted attempt to blame my brother, but he was nowhere in sight. We threw away the bread, kept the broom, and said very little.

He finally came home hours later. He had arrived earlier, seen the blistered paint and the impaled bread, and left the house at a run. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him.

We moved a year later. None of us minded. Even my father packed quickly.

I still don’t believe in ghosts.

But I believe in memory, and in the things a house can hold long after the person who built it lets go.

(From an earlier post)

Obert showed up over winter break with a new .22 pistol and suggested we go shooting. I had my .22 Ruger and my dad’s 38/.357 he’d bought at the same time. We grabbed ammo, drove as far as the dirt lot allowed, then hiked over a few hills to the bayshore.

We found a small rain pond full of cans and bottles—good targets—and spent an hour shooting everything to pieces. Down to the last rounds and the last bottle, I reloaded fast and decided to practice a quick draw.

My holster wasn’t tied to my leg. When I drew, it twisted, the barrel caught, my thumb slipped, and the gun fired. The bullet went through three layers of leather, into my thigh, hit bone, shattered, and stopped.

I found myself flat in the mud, feet in the pond.

“I’m shot!”

Obert looked over. “No you’re not. I didn’t hear anything.”

We found the holes in the leather. Then the hole in my leg. No exit.

“Get me out of here.”

He first had to go to the bathroom. Then he went to find the access road. I lay in the mud while a German shepherd dripped water on me and its owner said, “Yeah, I used to shoot down here too,” and kept walking.

Almost an hour later, Obert came roaring down the access road—right past me. He reversed, tried to load me into the car, realized the passenger door was locked, unlocked it, turned back, and watched Max the dog jump into the seat again. The owner removed him at his usual glacial pace.

The Drive Out

We lurched onto the access road. The windshield was splattered with clumps of mud but still usable. Then we hit a puddle. More mud. Still fine.

Then Obert turned on the wipers.

One swipe turned the entire windshield into a solid wall of brown. Total blackout.

We rolled the windows down and stuck our heads out like two injured hounds trying to navigate by smell.

At the next intersection, Obert tapped the horn for safety.

The horn button launched off the wheel, smacked him in the face, and vanished all the way into the way-back of the station wagon—a perfect trajectory into the automotive void—leaving the horn jammed in one continuous scream.

Now we were blind, muddy, fishtailing, and blasting a county-wide alarm.

That was my ride to the hospital.

Aftermath

At the ER, Obert disconnected the battery to silence the horn. The doctor came in with X-rays.

“You’ve been shot. Bullet shattered on the bone. A few pieces are in the muscle.”

“What now?”

“Nothing. Maybe someday a piece will work its way out.”

That was the entire treatment plan.

I healed slowly, entered college with a cane, and still check my leg for shrapnel.

And I don’t quick-draw anymore.

Sure, the Andes have their show-off credentials. Super-high mountains. Lake Titicaca—the highest navigable lake in the world, and definitely the best lake for mischievous elementary boys who need a good story later in life.

But the Andes also gave us something stranger and far more delicious: potato–tomato. Same family. Same neighborhood. Two plants domesticated within a long day’s hike of each other, both up in that thin air where people know how to survive and plants learn tricks.

Here’s the part your brain likes:

potatoes and tomatoes are opposites wearing the same jacket.

Potato berries? Boring and yucky—don’t touch. Eat the root. Tomato roots? Nasty—don’t touch. Eat the berries.

Nightshades are like that: one big family reunion where most of the cousins are toxic, dramatic, or both. Out of roughly 3,000 varieties, maybe eight are worth inviting to dinner. The edible ones include eggplant (India), peppers (Mexico/Peru), and the Andean tag-team that changed half the globe’s cooking.

So thank you, Andes.

Without you, Italian food loses its red sauce, Irish food loses its foundation, Slavic and German food lose their comfort staples, and American diners lose their fries, ketchup, salsa, chili, hash browns, and basically their will to live.

I used to say that some things just feel natural. You pick up an object and your hands already know how to hold it, as if you’ve been living with it your whole life. It’s rare—most things are foreign to us. Horses, for example, sit firmly on the other end of the spectrum for me. But a needle and thread? That I understood from the start. As early as I can remember.

I don’t mean I was a prodigy, just that I felt some kind of hidden comfort. And if you understand needle and thread, you eventually end up making things. Which means you face the oldest question in sewing:

Do you hold the needle still and move the thread, or hold the thread still and move the needle?

Before I’m done here, I’ll try to answer that.

I don’t have hundreds of thousands of examples of my sewing craft. Not hundreds. Barely dozens. A natural affinity doesn’t guarantee quantity—or quality—just a feeling. A confidence. The sense of I can do this while other people shake their heads.

“Replace a broken crankshaft? Yelp it.”

“New idea for hiking clothes? Let’s go to Joann’s Fabrics.”

One of my early experiments came from backpacking. Why carry shorts for hot days and long pants for cold nights? Why not sew shorts with attachable pant legs?

I explored my options:

• grommets and lacing — too slow, too fiddly, and nowhere to hide the laces

• Velcro — worked until the fabric stretched and it exploded open with a terrible rip

• zippers — specifically the large YKK kind used in sleeping bags and tents

Zippers won.

Material was the next problem. I wasn’t above using a pattern, but I ended up modifying my favorite long pants: soft, slightly worn Levi’s 501s. Not ideal when wet, but rugged, comfortable, and unremarkable—unless someone noticed the zippers.

Later I switched to a light poly/cotton blend that dried quickly and weighed almost nothing. A full decade later I finally saw a commercial version of what I’d sewn. I doubt I had anything to do with that.

I wore the zip-off pants everywhere, even to work. The only embarrassing moment came when a female faculty member painting her office yelled across the quad:

“John! I’m painting. Zip off your pants and help!”

That one echoed for years.

Another sewing episode happened right after I left the military and returned to college. My focus was scattered, and I needed a project. Fall was coming; I wanted a warm shirt-jacket hybrid. I had four or five worn-out 501s that no longer fit. I seam-ripped them into parts.

The legs tapered nicely into sleeves. The back pockets became front pockets. I drafted a shoulder yoke and front/back panels. The collar took some trial and error. The closure took even more. A pullover was either too big once on, or impossible to get on if it fit. I settled on a YKK zipper to the collarbone and used the button fly for the last six inches.

I wore it for months before I overheard someone say:

“Here comes dickhead.”

Now, I’ve been called worse, but that one felt… pointed.

Later on, parenthood brought Halloween for the children. As parents we did not go big on home decor, but we paid attention to costumes. Most store-bought choices were easy—but bad. The better choice was a needle and thread.

The benefit was longevity. Costumes had a generational life: some passed from sister to sister, some made it from mother to daughter. The difference was technical. My early attempts were hand-sewn, with the fabric unraveling over time.

I reluctantly went to machine work on long straight runs, with hand stitching at the crucial corners. Eventually I worked out even the tight corners. I still prefer hand sewing long stitches, then securing everything with machine hems—far better than pins.

I’m not saying I mastered machine work. The extra tricks—buttonholes, decorative stitching—were not for me. I stayed in a narrow lane: stitch length and tension for different fabrics.

After buying two kits for parkas from Frostline, I made both entirely with machine work on an old Singer that worked, but pretty much only went straight. Both parkas were very successful. I left mine somewhere a few years ago, but Sherry had hers until a few weeks ago. Our grandson needed a rain-resistant coat for camping, so Sherry gave him hers.

My next big project was sleeping bags for the family. I had a great bag from Sierra Designs that I’d used for years. It was a modified mummy design that could be opened flat like a quilt. I decided to use that as a model for two bags that could be zipped together.

The pre-planning forced me to gather supplies from several sources. In pre-Amazon days this meant driving some distance and waiting several weeks for UPS deliveries. Finally I had everything.

I didn’t know how long the project would take, so scattering fabric around the house seemed ill-advised. I retreated to the garage, where the pool table was better than the dining room table. I set up the machine on the pool table, fed by a large thread spool on a nearby pole. I pre-wound half a dozen bobbins to speed up assembly.

I’d bought matching yards of ripstop nylon for the shell and the liner: a soft, silky blue for the interior and a tougher black for the exterior. Everything fit the bolt width. The only challenge was sewing the seven-inch-high baffles for the down tubes. I built one bag at a time, learning on the first.

The down came from a custom shop specializing in premium goose down—lightweight, excellent loft. When all was sewn, I stuffed the tubes, but even with careful control, down escaped everywhere. The garage turned into a snow globe. I tried, and failed, to suck it up with a shop vac. Eventually I opened the garage door for several days until the birds redistributed the fluff into their nests.

With the next bags, I set up a large enclosed yard tent, placed the sewing machine and down inside, zipped myself in, and worked inside the contained snow globe. Afterwards, I could vacuum up every feather.

The bags were so successful we still have them forty years later. One has been used every night as a bed comforter. Some tears have been stitched tight, but no seams have ever burst.

A few weeks ago I researched replacing Sherry’s parka. Frostline had been closed for almost twenty years, but complete Frostline kits have popped up on Etsy. For forty-five dollars I bought the exact kit I used for hers. It arrived within a week, and I modified it with an additional wool liner. We’re not backpacking anymore, so weight wasn’t a concern—warmth was. Yesterday I finished the kit with the last hem, using the last of the thread on the bobbin and the spool. It looks good.

Today I went back on Etsy and found my own 1980s parka kit — also for forty-five dollars.

I’m waiting with pins and needles.

Oh yeah- needle still, move the thread.

A Story

There is a room with a chair. It sits 3/4 s on the far wall, next to the table, near the front window. It is well worn, wooden, but not ladder backed. The front legs are curved and end in the feet. One of the back legs has a little wad of paper taped to the bottom. The chair used to tip a bit, but no more.

The room was spare, it had other furniture, but none showed care like the chair. It did not match the table, it was a stranger to the others.

When a person was in the room, the chair was used. Its position allowed someone to see out the window to the courtyard, and to the other windows facing the courtyard.

The chair, and the window were on the third floor of a six floored apartment building. It was perfectly placed to look across, to look down, and to look up. The window pane sometimes vibrated with the noise of outside.

The chair does not see.

But it feels.

 

It has learned the language of weight:

   •   a child is a brief landing

   •   a lover is a settling-in

   •   guilt is a hover

   •   grief is a collapse

   •   fear barely touches the seat

   •   certainty is a full downward surrender

The chair has never spoken, but it has judged more honestly than any mirror.

It knows the difference between:

   •   someone who sits to rest

   •   someone who sits to think

   •   someone who sits to listen

   •   someone who sits because they do not dare to stand

 

It feels direction, too.

Weight shifts north when someone steels themselves.

Weight shifts east when someone hides something.

Weight shifts west when someone waits for an answer that will not come.

Weight shifts south when someone gives up.

 

Some people treat a chair like an object. Others treat it like a confessional. The chair remembers the difference.

 

Someone enters the room.

Not abruptly — but with the kind of pause at the threshold that the chair recognizes.

A pause that has weight.

A pause that decides whether to sit or not.

The chair feels the air shift first.

It always does.

The floorboard gives the faintest complaint beneath the first step.

It’s a careful step — not timid, not tired, but measured.

The step of someone carrying a thought they haven’t decided what to do with.

The someone crosses the room, not looking at the chair,

but walking the perimeter the way people do when they’re making deals with themselves.

They glance toward the window.

The window gives back the courtyard, the other windows, the stacked lives.

But the someone doesn’t look at the view long —

only long enough to confirm what they already knew was there.

Then they turn toward the chair.

The chair can tell immediately:

   •   this is not a visitor

   •   not a person passing through

   •   not someone lost

   •   not someone afraid of the room

This is someone who has been here before but is not sure they belong here now.

The weight that settles into the chair is familiar and changed.

A shift that says they’re holding something in instead of sinking down.

The chair feels the uncertainty in the thighs, the hesitation in the spine, the way one palm rests on the table as if bracing for news that hasn’t arrived yet.

The someone sits —

not fully, not finally,

but enough for the chair to judge:

They have returned to make a decision they don’t yet want to name.

The someone does not settle.

Not yet.

The someone sits, not fully, not finally, but enough for the chair to judge: They have returned to make a decision, they don’t yet want to name.

The someone does not settle.

Not yet.

They sit in the chair the way a person holds a question on their tongue — present, but not spoken. Their gaze drops. A slow, precise glance finds the back leg—the one with the small, taped wad of paper stabilizing the system. The look is not inquisitive, but confirming. The wad is there.

The chair, though perfectly steady, feels the necessity of the check; it feels the weight of remembering what it costs to be stable.

Their back stays an inch from the chair’s full support. The weight is tilted forward, toward possibility, toward interruption. The chair feels the tension running down one thigh, the way the heel doesn’t quite rest on the floor. This is a posture with a direction. 

They sit in the chair the way a person holds a question on their tongue — present, but not spoken. Their back stays an inch from the chair’s full support.

The weight is tilted forward, toward possibility, toward interruption.

The chair feels the tension running down one thigh, the way the heel doesn’t quite rest on the floor. This is a posture with a direction.

 

The someone is not waiting for time to pass. They are waiting for a signal.

 

A faint shift in the hallway’s air. A shadow sliding under the door. A hinge complaining at the far end.

Someone else moving through the building with a purpose that intersects this room. The chair senses the alertness.

It knows this type:

   •   poised

   •   listening

   •   braced

   •   too still to be calm

   •   too quiet to be at peace

 

Then— a sound. Not loud.

Just the familiar syncopation of shoes on the third-floor boards.

Measured steps. Not running, not hesitant. The tempo of a person who has come here before.

The someone closes their eyes for a breath. Their weight shifts slightly back, as if deciding whether to stand before the steps arrive at the door.

The chair absorbs the choice. The footsteps continue Unbroken. Approaching.

 

The someone doesn’t move. Not forward. Not away. Just waits. More tightly than before.

 

The chair feels all of it. The footsteps stop.

Not abruptly — not with that impatient halt that means knocking is next — but with a quiet, deliberate stillness.

 

A stillness long enough to make the someone in the chair tighten their grip on the front edge of the seat.

 

The chair feels the pressure of fingertips pressing meaning into the wood. Seconds pass. Enough to count. Enough to miscount. Enough to wonder if the footsteps were imagined, if the hallway held only echoes, if the building was shifting its old bones again.

The someone in the chair leans forward a fraction of an inch. Not enough to rise. Just enough to surrender to the doubt: Were those steps real?

The pause stretches. The air holds.

 The chair cannot see — but it knows when a person’s weight tilts toward the door. It knows the subtle forward slide of anticipation, the breath held just past comfort.

Then — soft, unmistakable:

 

A pivot. Not a retreating panic-step. Not a misdirection. Just a single, careful turn of the body facing away from the door. A decision not to enter.

The steps begin again, moving down the hall, fading toward a stairwell or another door or nowhere at all.

 

And in the chair, the someone finally exhales. Not relief. Not disappointment. Just the sound of a person who has waited, for something that chose not to arrive.

Someone rises from the chair. Not quickly — but with that kind of slow lift where the weight stays behind a moment, as if the body is negotiating with the room.

The chair remembers their shape, and releases them without complaint.

The someone steps toward the window, close enough for the glass to catch their breath and fog the courtyard into a soft, trembling blur. Outside, the building across the way keeps its usual posture — curtain, shutter, balcony, rail — all the small architectures of other lives.

 

The courtyard: a scatter of passing shadows, a stroller, a dog, a neighbor leaning on a railing, two bicycles left against a wall, an absence where someone should be.

Someone tilts their head, scanning the patterns of arrival and departure, the flicker of figures through other windows, the rise and fall of motion on all six floors. Then, barely above breath — quiet enough that the word falls into the windowpane instead of the room —

“Why?”

Not spoken to the courtyard. Not to the vanished footsteps. Not to the chair. Not even to themselves.

Just released — like a question with no direction, looking for a place to land.

The someone stays at the window a moment longer, watching the courtyard continue its indifferent choreography, coming and going, answerless.

And time shifts. The room remains. The chair remains. The wad of paper remains. The window stays tethered to the courtyard’s small, indifferent pulse. Only the light changes.

Another someone enters — different gait, different tension, carrying a different question. They walk the same perimeter. They pause at the same threshold between settling and fleeing. They place the same hand on the table.

The chair feels the same hesitation in the spine, the same weight held back, the same almost-sitting that becomes sitting. Everything echoes. But the whisper, when it finally comes — soft against the same pane of glass, caught in the same breath that fogs the courtyard— is not “Why?”

It is: “Who?”

The word lands without answer. The room absorbs it. The chair holds it. The courtyard does not respond.

Lights fade.

Blackout.