Day 032 Hour 02: Life That Doesn't Sleep
I stepped outside at exactly 02:00.
The hallway was dark, as always. But this darkness wasn't like the evening. This was thinner. More fragile. Like the shadows were stretched so tight over the bones of the building that even a whisper could split them open.
The air felt colder now, not because the temperature dropped — but because everything had slowed.
Time didn't move here.
It just hovered.
I took the stairs quietly, instinctively skipping the fourth one from the top — the one that creaks like a warning bell.
Once outside, I started walking.
The neighborhood wasn't dead. Not fully. There's no such thing here. The slums shift, like the tide. When the vendors sleep, the metal pickers are awake. When the dogs go quiet, the rats take over. Something is always moving — you just don't always see it.
I passed a man asleep upright in a plastic chair, his head slumped forward, hands gripping a walking stick like it might run without him. A soft light flickered behind him in a window — a soap opera or a looping ad. I couldn't tell.
Two blocks down, a child was drawing chalk lines on the sidewalk. Alone. Quiet. No urgency. Just long, repeating spirals — a universe forming under the faint orange glow of a flickering streetlamp. I didn't say anything. She didn't look up.
I passed a dog that didn't bark.
I passed a curtain that moved when there was no wind.
I passed a house that had burned months ago, but someone had strung a clothesline across its front frame anyway.
By the time I reached the spine of Ash Row, I'd counted six empty carts, one limping cat, and a woman humming to herself as she braided plastic strips into a rope beneath a tarp.
No one looked at me.
But everyone knew I was there.
That's the rhythm of this place.
If you belong here, you move like you're invisible.
If you don't... well, you never learn how to move.
I slowed my pace as the block narrowed.
Stairwells rose like teeth — cement, chipped and damp, stacked on either side. Somewhere in the middle of them was 22B.
My next frame.
Day 032 Hour 07: Familiar Angles
Ash Row had changed very little in the last five years.
Same mold in the corners. Same water stains bleeding down the sides of the stairwell walls. Same rust-framed railings with zip ties and balled-up plastic where the original joints had given up.
I didn't creep this time.
I walked in like I belonged — because I did.
I'd taken this stairwell more times than I could count. Not for anything good. Never for shelter. Always to pass a message. To pick something up. To leave something behind.
But I knew it.
That mattered.
22B wasn't a unit.
It was a landing.
Technically between levels two and three — a concrete platform where a window used to be before someone bricked it up halfway. Rain pooled there when the drain clogged. It always dried uneven, leaving behind those pale chalk rings that looked like tree stumps if you stared too long.
I stood there now, just as the sun began slicing between buildings, its light broken into long shadows and golden smears.
I didn't wait for a buzz.
Didn't need to.
07:10. Exactly.
I raised the phone and took the photo.
Click.
It was clean.
Stairwell in frame.
No movement.
Just the layered decay of an overused structure with nowhere left to fall.
But my eyes didn't drop right away.
They kept scanning the corners. The rust line under the top step. The discoloration in the concrete. The two cigarette butts that hadn't been there last week. The smear of something black under the pipe elbow — grease? Tar? Blood?
Nothing moved.
But something had.
I could feel it.
Still, I didn't investigate.
Didn't lean closer. Didn't poke around.
Because in places like this, you don't find answers.
Just reasons to be involved.
And I had enough of those already.
I pocketed the phone and walked back down the steps, boots brushing the grit off each rise without a sound.
Four down.
One left.
And for the first time since the first envelope arrived…
…I felt like I didn't want the last one to come.
Day 032 Hour 12: Market Memory
The last location wasn't far — geographically speaking.
But emotionally, it was miles away.
Market Square.Behind the old garment factory.Northwest pillar.17:55.
It had sounded simple when I first read it. But nothing about Market Square was ever simple.
The name was a lie.
It wasn't a square. And it wasn't really a market.
Not in the way people outside would think.
It was a wide concrete basin behind the old factory lot — one of those buildings where thread and cloth used to mean something. Now it was just a husk: cracked windows, birds in the rafters, and a floor scattered with broken pallets and rusted nail buckets.
The space behind it — Market Square — had never been zoned, never paved, never planned. It was claimed. Stitched together by misfit shopkeepers and wandering vendors who decided, silently and without permission, that this was where deals would be made.
Not because it was ideal.
But because it was equidistant from nowhere.
And for people like us, that was a kind of power.
I knew the place.
Well.
This was where I used to sell the furniture I scraped together from cast-offs and trash heap skeletons. Broken chairs turned into crooked stools. Tables made from old doors. Stuff no one really wanted but bought anyway because it looked like work.
Some weeks, I made just enough to breathe.
Other weeks, I broke even on sweat alone.
But I'd stood there. Day after day. Trying to make broken things useful again.
Trying to prove I could do more than survive.
That I could build.
So when I saw "Market Square" on the list… it hit different.
It wasn't just a place.
It was a mirror.
And now I was being told to photograph it — not to return to it, not to sell or engage or speak — but to document it.
From the northwest pillar.
At a specific time.
No reason.
No context.
Just presence.
Just proof.
I looked down at the phone in my hand and turned the screen over.
I didn't want to see it just then.
Not yet.
Because I wasn't sure if I'd be holding a camera later…
…or just a trigger.