the top page

Once again, there have been changes, and not for the better.

“This is wrong,” you mutter. As you enter, your eyes leap to the usual place, and there they are, waiting.

Pages of revisions. The stack seems thicker.

You confirm the worst—a glance is sufficient—then retreat to the sofa. Thirty minutes pass, or perhaps an hour. You light another cigarette and stare at it. You keep perfectly still.

This is wrong, you think. Again, the vertiginous feeling of being lost in the fog, a lurching halt at the cliff’s edge, toes adangle, perched on one’s heels at the imperceptible cusp of an endless drop—Wrong? Whenever you come back to it, it’s wrong. But this time, it didn’t seem to have been tampered with, not at first…now, weighing the stack with your eyes, you wonder—are these changes yours? How to be sure? In the end, all you have is your own memory.

Finally, you lean forward. Keeping to habit, you check chronologically, from the bottom up, an inversion of an archeological dig. Peeking at the bottommost page, you wince—that’s wrong—and you flip a hundred pages up, where it’s worse still, carrying terrifying implications.

When you reach the top page, you take a breath and begin to read.