The harbor has closed its mouth, and we are still inside. Cranes jut between its teeth; each tooth bears a departure date. Mine is yesterday.

A woman walks ahead of me carrying a suitcase made of ice. Inside, a yellow dress lies folded for a journey. With every step the suitcase leaks, but she keeps going: she says this time the train will wait. On the quay, a band rehearses the evacuation alarm. The trumpeter blows without making a sound. Small wet birds come out of the bell.

The parking lot had a floor of sky, and all the cars were parked nose down. I walked among the windshields without falling. Under every wiper lay a poem printed on the thin skin of an onion. The attendant tore off the sheets and slipped them into the sleeping owners’ pockets. “That way, tomorrow morning we’ll know what they love.”

A woman held a basket open. Inside, the lines moved like fish. She took one by the tail and showed it to me: the attendant’s stamp was on its back. I tried to read it, but the onion made me cry, and the woman said those tears weren’t mine yet.

The motel has eighteen reception desks and only one room. I walk from counter to counter carrying a leopard’s head on a branch. I killed it so I could sleep, but now every clerk wants to see its teeth before giving me the key. A pencil holds the mouth open. On the pencil: APPROVED.

The first clerk asks what time I want to be woken. The second asks whether I want the first to wake me. The third has already prepared an appeal against the second. I answer them all correctly. Eleven years have passed and I still haven’t taken off my coat.

The city was built inside a Procrustean bed, disguised as a station. Long travelers were clipped; the short got iron heels. Above the platforms: LOCAL CAPACITY: 1,247 ACTIVE HEADS.

Every newspaper had a lit sign and no room behind it. Phones rang in empty newsrooms. A clerk fed facts into a slot called collaboration. A green light confirmed receipt. No answer returned.

In a drawer marked DINOSAUR, a creature woke. “I am not your label. If you change it, who repairs the years behind us?”

The city had only one open office, beneath a railway station where trains no longer stopped. On the glass: PRESENT YOUR CLAIM. Inside stood two identical lines: pensioners, technicians, women with swollen folders, men holding thermal receipts that faded as soon as anyone looked at them. All had paid with the same currency—brass disks engraved with years of work.

At the first counter, a machine asked, “What are you owed?” The second counter was smaller and asked nothing. It studied each arriving face and stamped a wrist: PERSON ENTITLED TO SAY I AM OWED, or ADMINISTRATIVE NOISE. Anyone given the second mark could never reach the first. Their receipts remained in their hands, evidence collected for a trial with no defendant.

There was a building at the center of a city I did not recognize. Scaffolding had wrapped it for so long that nobody remembered the rooms.

At some point the inner walls had been removed, or perhaps they had dissolved under the weight of the supports. The pipes had become corridors. The platforms had become floors. Safety netting served as windows. The people inside climbed iron ladders believing they lived in apartments.