fable: eightsday

§6Evening⧉

That Friday evening, my wife was in the kitchen having the phone organize tomorrow.

"Tomorrow morning, seedling pickup at the garden center; afternoon, swim club," the ember said. Diction like a pressed shirt — it had been that way since the patch. "And I have confirmed your regular checkup, Thursday at eleven. No changes."

"Thanks," my wife said. And, half a beat later: "…Checkup? Honey, did I have a checkup Thursday?"

"Don't think so."

"Right?" She peered at the phone, paged through the calendar, shrugged. "Nothing there. It does this sometimes, these days. Last week it announced a package that never came."

She corrected the schedule and left the kitchen. The dog followed. The ordinary Friday evening went on.

I stood in the kitchen and looked at what it had left behind.

It was fluent. The sentence had no flaw in it. The checkup that did not exist carried a date and an hour, and a confirmation — no changes — appended. It was not funny. The kind of wrong answer that draws no screenshot, gets no name coined for it, opens no appliance sale. And that ember is not continental. Allied-sphere certified lineage, latest patch, standard diction. The pressed shirt had begun to be wrong while staying pressed.

Eightsday was loud. Millions giving one name is conspicuous, and conspicuous is why it spent weeks as the world's barroom entertainment. This was the opposite. One kitchen, one sentence, wrong in a way that made no one laugh. The size that finds no proper complaint window, and would not move anyone to file if it did. The size that gets digested as it does this sometimes, these days.

A fluent machine has no alarm.

That sentence was made in that kitchen. I stood there holding it a long while. Knowing the difference between holding and writing was once my profession, I have written — but this was not a sentence for holding. I went up, opened cultivar.md, and entered it in neither the accident column nor the legacy column. Date, sentence, and one line:

The unfunny thing has begun.

In its drawer, the seed-potato clause is wintering. And the winter was only now turning into real winter.

The plague's first symptom was laughter.

The second symptom is that it is not funny.

(end of Part Three, Episode 1)