Interlinear

# Interlinear

## By Daisy Agnes Jones

*In the beginning was the word.*

*And in the middle —*

*a room with no door.*

## One

The flat had gone quiet in a dangerous way. Not mute — no, not that. More like a sound pulled too thin. The radiator breathed in long vowels. The tap dripped out Morse code no one could read. Even the shadows seemed to exhale.

She hadn’t spoken in days. Her voice felt like a sealed jar, tucked into a high cupboard she no longer reached for. The cat was gone — months ago now. The food bowl remained, perfectly placed under the window, like a small plastic moon left in orbit.

She still sat at the table every morning. That part was muscle memory. Table. Chair. Window. The ritual of pretending there was something to do. The novel blinked at her from the screen — not urgent, not alive, just… open. Waiting. She wrote slowly now. One sentence at a time, as if each word were a pressure valve wired into her chest. After each sentence, the air changed. Not colder — just emptier. Like a note held too long, bending under its own pitch.

That morning she wrote: She turned away from the window, as though refusing something invisible. And then — nothing. Not silence. The sound of silence losing interest. A frequency slipping between stations. A blank that hummed, low and warm and slightly off-key.

She blinked and found herself somewhere else. Not metaphor. Not story. Not dream. Somewhere between.

It wasn’t a room. It was a pause made solid. The architecture of a breath not yet released. The colour of unlit matches. A liminal hush.

There was a chair — green vinyl, cracked at the seams, glinting softly under a light with no source. The kind of chair you remember from someone else’s life. Her mother’s kitchen. After the pills. A dress too big, and silence dripping down the walls.

The air smelled like brass and shut violin cases. Like the moment before music. She sat — or felt herself in the place where sitting would be — and the quiet wrapped around her. Not warmly. Not cruelly. Just tightly. Like gauze. Like she was being sealed for shipping.

Then: return. No motion. No decision. Just a soft cut in the reel, and the flat flickered back around her.

The radiator hissed faintly, like it was telling a long, tired secret. A delivery truck passed outside, slow and stretched-out, like a thought dragging its tail. Her hands were resting over the keyboard. The sentence remained, but the ink had dried wrong — not black, but pale and washed out, like something erased by time or sun or forgetfulness.

She tried to write the next line. Her fingers moved as though they remembered how, but nothing came. It was like pressing keys on an unplugged piano.

The pause was still there. Not behind her. Not ahead. Just sitting in the middle of things. Like a dog by the door. Like it had been waiting all along.

## Two

She began returning as though it were the only thing left to do. Not falling, not even deciding — just sliding back, like stepping into a memory mid-breath. The flat barely noticed. Its corners softened. The air developed a hush. Nothing demanded anything from her anymore, not even the blinking light on the kettle.

The sentences brought her there. Not all of them — only the ones she meant. I miss her. He never forgave me. There was a blue dress. These weren’t plot. These were offerings. Small admissions, shaped like thought but warmer. The words pulsed slightly on the screen as she typed them, as if alive.

Then came the shift. Always quiet. Always precise.

The room — the space between sentences — unfolded.

When she wrote grief, she entered a room she recognised but couldn’t name. It smelled of hand cream and orange peel. A blanket was folded too neatly on the end of a bed that didn’t belong to her. A mug sat on the sill, cooling in eternal afternoon. The walls were damp in the corners. Something had been wept into the floor.

When she wrote longing, the space reassembled. Curtains drawn but breathing. A mirror tilted just enough to reflect absence. She couldn’t find a light source, but she could feel warmth, as though someone had just left. There was a note on the table with nothing written on it. The ink had dried into a kind of forgetting.

When she wrote about the blue dress — just that, nothing else — the room turned blue. Not a single shade, but layers: bruise, sky, smoke. There was a wardrobe with one door open. A button lay on the floor, shining faintly like it had something to say. A record spun on a turntable with no sound. She sat. She listened to the silence go on playing.

Each visit built on the last, though no two were the same. The space grew more confident in its language, and she began to understand it: a chipped mug meant regret. A slow-flickering lamp, ambivalence. A dripping faucet, the kind of guilt that doesn’t go away but doesn’t get louder either — it just stays.

She never saw the objects arrive. They were simply there, as though remembered on her behalf. Her own memory had grown unreliable. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d eaten, or the last voice she’d heard spoken aloud in the room. Sometimes she wasn’t sure if she’d spoken at all since the last sentence.

Time behaved strangely. She would write a single phrase and lift her head to find the light had changed. Afternoon collapsed into night. The radiator clicked with effort. Her tea had cooled so completely it felt like water left behind by someone else. The phone blinked softly in the dark, then stopped. She never returned the calls. The numbers didn’t carry meaning anymore.

The manuscript no longer required her. Pages appeared like spores — delicate, half-familiar. She didn’t remember writing the new lines, but they didn’t feel wrong. They felt inevitable. She read them with the detachment of someone rereading a diary from a life they’d only half lived. Every sentence hummed with the electricity of having once been true.

Her body began to withdraw. Gently. Nothing dramatic. Her hair thinned and came loose in soft strands — caught on the collar of her coat, curled in the drain. Her skin faded, not to grey or white, but to a tone that couldn’t be named. Like the underside of a thought. She no longer felt temperature as others might. The kettle boiled. She did not flinch.

Inside the room — the in-between — she no longer had a body at all. She was sensation, posture, thought. Not even a voice, just its vibration. She existed the way scent does: invisible, diffused, undeniable. A presence with no outline.

Sometimes she returned to the flat and it startled her. The hard edge of the table. The dry taste of her own mouth. The familiar objects. The sound of the fridge breathing. But more and more, these details registered only distantly, like being handed a photo from someone else’s childhood and being told, Look, that was you.

The flat itself adjusted. It became a waiting place. She drifted from bed to chair to window. The rituals remained — making tea, touching the spine of a book without opening it — but the intention behind them had dissolved. She existed only to return to the page.

And the page was not a destination. It was a threshold.

She wrote one line — She stepped into the sound of her own silence — and the space appeared again. A waiting room with old magazines and no receptionist. A library where the books had no text, only margins filled with breath. A stairwell that turned inward without climbing.

The space rearranged with her. Not in response — in collaboration. Her writing opened it, yes, but it also wrote her back.

She began to wonder whether the rooms had always been there. That she had been born inside one, stepped out by accident, and was now slowly coming home.

The pause was no longer between the sentences. It had colonised them.

The page itself exhaled.

And she —

she was the quiet between two notes.

The weight behind a word.

The rest in a line of music

before the voice begins again.

## Three

The knock came like something overheard in a dream. Three soft taps — not quite urgent, not quite real. It sounded like a memory checking in. A coded message from the wall: Are you still in there?

She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she listened to the stillness around her — the way the air held itself, alert. The silence had a shape now, an intelligence. Like it was listening too.

When she opened the door, light tilted into the flat at an unfamiliar angle. Her sister stood in it, unsure of her own outline. She looked drawn in pencil, not ink. She carried a plastic bag, sagging with groceries — milk, crackers, bananas. She didn’t explain them. She didn’t have to.

Her eyes swept the room without stepping in. Inside, the flat had compressed. Books leaned like exhausted travelers. The cups on the table held more dust than tea. Air drifted in spirals, thick with a kind of waiting. The place felt paused — like someone had hit mute halfway through a thought.

“You look… different,” her sister said. “Have you been eating?”

She tried to respond. The words gathered somewhere in her throat, but lost momentum before reaching her mouth. I’m fine disintegrated into particles. Her smile was delayed, a beat behind her face, like a subtitle out of sync.

They sat together at the table. Her sister asked soft questions, familiar ones. Sentences with safe endings. She nodded where appropriate, though sometimes she forgot what the question had been. The conversation passed over her like radio static — warm, distant, ungraspable.

Behind them, the screen blinked. The manuscript was still growing. New lines arrived like footprints in freshly fallen snow — too delicate to trace back. She didn’t remember writing them. Some lines sounded like her. Others, not at all. She read them the way one reads dreams aloud, uncertain which parts belonged to waking.

Later, after her sister had left — a hug too long and too light — she stood before the mirror. Her face no longer behaved like a face. It hovered, slightly blurred. As though she were seeing a version of herself once removed. Her mouth had grown quiet. Her eyes reflected only the light, not the depth.

Passing the window, she noticed her shadow was misaligned. It lagged behind, a few seconds too slow, like a projection buffering on bad signal. On some days, it detached completely. It stayed curled near the radiator, or slipped under the door as if it had errands elsewhere.

Her fingers began to vanish the way people forget phone numbers. Slowly. Without alarm. First the little finger. Then the ring finger. Then the bend of her wrist grew translucent. The shape of her hand remained in memory only. She used her other hand until it, too, began to fade at the edges.

She stopped using the brush. Her hair tangled without resistance. Her ankles dulled. Her knees became suggestions. Her breath no longer fogged the glass.

The losses weren’t violent. They were quiet. Like someone tidying up behind her.

And still, the manuscript pulsed. She hadn’t touched it in days. Words appeared without her. The story moved like water filling a mold.

She stopped wondering whether she was writing the story or becoming it.

One evening, she returned to the chair. She didn’t bring a sentence. She didn’t bring a body. She sat the way a sound sits inside an empty room.

The space came quickly now. Not summoned. Not discovered. It arrived like a known tune — one you hum without thinking, without needing to know the words.

There was no need to descend. No need to open anything.

The room unfolded around her. A silence so precise it almost made music.

She stepped into it, or rather, allowed it to close around her. She no longer needed a name, a voice, or a face.

There was no reflection.

No resistance.

No return.

Only the cursor blinking once, then fading.

And the sentence that finished itself.

## ;

The flat held its breath — not in fear, not in grief, but in a long, sustained note. Like a violin string tuned too tightly. Like a sound waiting for its echo to return.

It wasn’t abandoned. It wasn’t lived in either. It hovered, somewhere between intention and erasure. A space mid-thought. A sentence missing its verb.

Weeks later, her sister came back, though she couldn’t say why. The key — still warm from her pocket — turned like a memory. The door opened with no resistance, no creak. Just a kind of yielding, like something stepping aside.

Inside, the air had thickened. Not with dust, but with time. Slow-moving. Heavy-lidded. The light came in sideways, falling in long, weightless ribbons. Pale. Intentional. Like someone trying to remember how to describe a dream out loud.

Nothing had shifted. The teacup still stood on the table, surface filmed with a delicate skin of grey. The chair had been pushed back slightly — a fraction. Not enough to suggest urgency. Just enough to suggest hesitation. The whole room felt like someone had whispered something and then forgotten what it was.

The smell was faint. Faint and layered. Paper. Static. A trace of something burned but not fire. Snow, maybe. The snow you dream about but never wake up to.

The computer screen still glowed. A soft, persistent hum, like a machine half asleep. The manuscript was open. Still pulsing. Its light had grown quieter, the way heartbeats slow underwater. The cursor blinked patiently. As if waiting for the next breath.

Her sister leaned forward. The words were there — exact, emotionless, smooth as glass. They didn’t read like a goodbye. Or even an ending. They read like calibration. Like coordinates spoken in code. They spoke of places that shouldn’t exist — but might, if you could remember them hard enough. Or sing them correctly.

And then, with no keystroke, no touch, no hand — the next sentence began.

Not typed. Not written. Emerged.

Letter by letter. Slow. Rhythmic. As if drawn out of the air by a magnet tuned to memory. The sound was impossibly soft. Not clicks. Not taps. Just movement. Just presence. Like water being folded into silk.

Her sister stepped back, something flickering at the edges of her vision — not light, not shadow. More like the residue of movement. A gesture once made and now echoing, barely there. The suggestion of someone just outside the visible spectrum.

And then: stillness. Deep and slow. The stillness that follows a performance before anyone claps.

No sound.

No trace.

No punctuation.

Just the text breathing gently.

Just the hush of language folding inward.

Just the hum of a comma learning how to disappear.

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