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.

A boy picks one up and asks me whether it will live until tomorrow. Before I can answer, the siren starts. Everyone comes off the ships carrying chairs, pots, sleeping people. The boy opens his hands. There is nothing there. “You see?” says a man with a register. I do not know what he wants me to have seen.

We go into the workshop. On the bench sits a tyrannosaur skull as wide as the room, with a label: SOUND MATERIAL. An old man files a tooth. He says it can bite a ship without breaking; then he asks me to help him out of his chair. His knees are tiny.

A crack runs beneath the skull. It crosses the bench, the floor, the sea. The woman tries her locker key in it. The crack gives her back a train ticket for her sister. Just one. She takes it and keeps walking.

The director wants the hole arrested. We find it on the back of a sheet of metal: oval, warm, breathing. I put handcuffs around it. They fall through to the other side. Now the hole is in my hand. Looking through it, I see the harbor as it was this morning, still full. I can hear the pots in the kitchens, but I cannot warn anyone.

Outside, they have taken down the siren because nothing happened. The trumpeter carries it like a child. The birds come back on their own and slip into his pockets.

The woman reaches the gate. Her suitcase is now a handle suspended in empty air. She sets it on the paving stones, steps through it, and disappears. I wait for the sound of the train. Instead, an enormous warm breath comes from my open hand.