Page 11 of Soft Erasure

Meal completion, logged when the tray is cleared and cross-checked against where I stand.

The audio monitor, the smoke detector on the bedroom’s hallway side, listening for what the system calls a notable vocal event.

And the tenth thing, the one that was not on the discharge sheet: a baseline, taken in a mirrored room before the date my chart calls intake.

I had not known there was a room. I am noting it because the tenth thing is the one they didn’t mean for me to count.

My chart is Volume IV, Number 11. The workbook says Protocol 4.2.

I am the eleventh woman in the fourth group of them, and the system runs on that sentence: one woman the same as the next, plus a number, minus a name.

The eleventh of the fourth is not kept lucid on her first night to watch the walls.

Whatever he was doing by leaving me awake, he was not doing it to a number. He was doing it to me.

The band had held at ninety-five. I had held at something it had no column for.

I had wanted him to believe me without the number, and I hadn’t let myself look at why.

On the floor in the dark the why sat closer than it had before. I watched it. I didn’t name it.

With one hand he had counted me, and stopped the count at six so I would finish it for him.

He had read my pulse without gripping, and opened a door for me without standing inside it.

It was not a list of tendernesses. It was the list of passes you make tuning an instrument.

He had held this one’s dose for a night so he could hear what it did awake.

A thing meant to be interchangeable does not get kept lucid for the sound it makes.

I added him to the inventory too, in the dark, working from memory instead of sight. Not his face; that one I’d kept off the list on purpose, and some entries you don’t make until you’re ready to be searched for them. What I had was smaller. The weight of two fingers, unhurried, on the inside of my wrist. The register his voice dropped to when nobody needed it to. The particular way a room got smaller when he was in it. My body had opinions about him that my mouth had never been asked to approve, and lying there with the dose that never came, I let it have them for once.

I cannot walk out the front door. The band lets me move through the building.

It does not let me out of it. Out is a ride someone else starts.

I cannot open the balcony with an Adherence under ninety. I cannot call out.

The landline is a microphone shaped like a phone: I can be heard on it, I cannot reach anyone through it.

I cannot put my hand on a knife; there are none. I cannot tell anyone I have the card, or be alone with the matchbook anywhere but the one room without a camera.

The heat came up through the floor the whole time I listed what it would not let me do, patient, warming the part of me making the list against it.

I can count. I can breathe to seven instead of six.

Hold the card closed in my fist, the blind spot he told me himself the cameras cannot read.

Keep the matchbook in the watch pocket, which he does not know to check.

Matthew gave me one blind spot. He does not know I came in with a second.

I ran the breath on the floor. Seven, because he stops at six.

At the clinic I had told myself the seventh count was the last thing in my body still mine.

Somewhere across the months it had stopped being mine-against-him and become the thing that let me breathe at all.