Thirty-Nine Left

There is a line below.

Do not write your name on it.

Not because names have power. Power is too clean a word, too ceremonial, too pleased with itself. A name is not a spell. A name is a handle. A tag pushed through the softest part of you before you were old enough to flinch. A strip of tape on a storage box. A record field. A doorbell. A thing strangers can say through glass until you come to the counter.

The line below has been used before. Sometimes it appeared on paper. Sometimes on a slate after midnight, glowing beside a file nobody had opened. Sometimes at the bottom of a civic form beneath the polite instruction CONFIRM IDENTITY. Sometimes in dust across a dead charge bay, scratched from inside the metal by something with patient nails. Sometimes it rose under skin, a pale groove along the wrist or throat, waiting for ink that did not come from a pen.

Still a line.

Still waiting.

__________________________________

If you wrote nothing, the page has recorded refusal. If you wrote your name, the page has begun comparison. If you only imagined writing it, that counts less. Not nothing. Less.

Do not look back at the line to check whether it changed. That is one of the ways it learns your habits.

There were forty once.

There are thirty-nine left.

Do not count them. Counting gives the list rhythm, and rhythm is one of the ways it learns to walk.