Ciudad Juárez, May 22, 02026, two fifty-five in the afternoon. Local Union 87 of the Lear trabajadores, 412 Calle 16 de Septiembre, second floor above don Refugio's tornillos shop. The desk of María Elena Castañeda, fifty-one, a union steward since 1998. Lupita Hernández Rivas, forty-three, has been in line for twenty-eight minutes. Ahead of her are two women, Beatriz Espinosa (forty-nine, line 7) and Rocío Núñez (thirty-eight, line 12).
María Elena works with a rectangular rubber stamp and a black ink pad she has been using since 2019. The ink is almost gone. She will press harder on the last four signatures of the day. On the wall behind María Elena, a framed A3 print carries a sentence by Salvador Allende in Spanish.
This morning Lupita drank a coffee with her mother at seven thirty. Her mother is sixty-seven and has had Parkinson's for four years. Lupita counted the tiles on the kitchen floor, forty-seven by thirty-eight, she counted them so she would not have to think. She took Memo to school at seven fifty. Memo is twelve. Memo is Guillermo in front of María del Carmen, and Memito in front of his grandmother. To the neighbor on the 9th floor he is "el niño de Lupita."
María del Carmen Salazar, HR Lear, twenty-eight, called her at nine thirty and at one forty. Lupita did not answer either call.
There are three options. First option: liquidación. Two hundred and twenty thousand pesos gross, one hundred and sixty-five thousand net. Eight months of base salary plus seniority bonus plus one month of IMSS coverage. Paid within thirty days. Taxed at twenty-five percent. Second option: traslado to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Flight for two (Lupita plus Memo, no abuela), afternoon daycare for Memo at the new Lear plant, two hours of English a week for Memo, base salary equal to Juárez, seniority bonus reset to zero, three-year contract, company housing provided for six months then at her expense. San Pedro Sula start: July 15, 02026. Third option: let the five days run out, Thursday May twenty-eighth at five o'clock sharp. Automatic reply, tacit waiver of the traslado, the standard liquidation kicks in without the "good faith" bonus of twenty-five thousand pesos. One hundred and forty thousand net instead of one hundred and sixty-five thousand.
María del Carmen had explained everything on Monday in a group meeting, with the slide projected. María del Carmen is twenty-eight. Over the past three months she has been trained in the "Compassionate Offboarding" program. She has learned to speak slowly. Not to interrupt. To say "I understand, Lupita."
In front of Lupita, Beatriz Espinosa signs the Traslado form. Beatriz cries in silence. She dries the signature on her jeans. She hands the sheet to María Elena. María Elena picks up the stamp. She presses it on the black ink pad. She lifts it. She brings it down on the Traslado box of Beatriz's form. The crack is dry. The black ink dries on the box at once. Beatriz takes the stamped sheet. She slides it into a brown envelope with the logo of Local Union 87. She turns. She walks out. She sees Lupita. She gives her a short nod with her eyes.
Lupita steps forward. It is her turn. On the desk is Lupita's pre-printed form, already filled in with her name (María de Guadalupe Hernández Rivas), already with her Lear ID (00-47-1289), already with the two little boxes. María Elena looks at her. María Elena is the mother of three grown children. She has known Lupita since 2008, when Lupita came to the union for the first time to ask how to fill out the H-2 form for Memo's maternity leave. María Elena raises the stamp. She holds it in midair. Slowly, in slow Spanish, she says to her: Lupita, ¿qué dice?
Lupita has the form in front of her and the voice in her throat. She knows María del Carmen will call her again at seven thirty tonight. She knows Monday's line will be longer because Monday is the day for those who put it off today. She thinks of Beatriz who has just walked out with the brown envelope. She thinks of Brayan from the 9th floor, twelve years old, vanished in February at the border behind a coyote paid in borrowed pesos. She thinks of her mother in the armchair beside her, at two fifty-five the mother is sleeping. At four thirty the mother will wake up and ask for arroz con leche.
She opens her mouth. The voice comes out small but whole. Two syllables: li-qui. A breath. The other two: da-ción.
María Elena nods twice. She places her free hand on the form to hold it steady. She brings the stamp down on the box on the left. The crack is dry. The black ink dries on the Liquidación box at once. She slides the stamped form into a brown envelope identical to Beatriz's. She tells her to come back next Wednesday, May twenty-seventh, to pick up the first partial check of thirty-five thousand pesos as an advance. She tells her, in slow Spanish, fuerza, compañera.
Lupita takes the envelope. She holds it against her chest. She walks out of the office.
She walks down the wooden staircase to the ground floor. Under the arcade of don Refugio's tornillos shop she passes three workers from line 4 going up for their turn at the desk. Marisol (thirty-nine), Pati (fifty-one), Brenda (forty-four). Marisol only says: Lupita. Pati gives her a nod. Brenda touches her arm. Lupita answers with her thumb raised and the brown envelope raised beside it.
She steps out onto Calle 16 de Septiembre. The three twenty sun hits her in the eyes. She walks a hundred meters to the pesero of line 23. She gets on. Seven pesos. The pesero pulls away. On the pesero's window, across the glass, the words Cementos Riva are written. Lupita gets off at the third stop. She walks up to the third floor of Cementos Riva at four oh five.
She opens the door. Her mother in the armchair is awake. Her eyes are open. She has eaten two spoonfuls of arroz con leche on her own. Memo is not back yet. The four o'clock sunlight comes through the window like a block. On the kitchen table, under the gas bills, the three photos from the quinceañera of 1998 are where Lupita left them this morning.
Lupita sets the brown envelope on the table, next to the bills. She walks to the armchair. She bends down. She says to her mother: mamá, mañana hablamos. Mañana hablamos. The mother nods. She smiles for a second. Then she sleeps again.
", "summary": "Ciudad Juárez, May 22, 02026, two fifty-five in the afternoon. Local Union 87 of the Lear trabajadores, 412 Calle 16 de Septiembre, second floor above don Refugio's tornillos shop. The desk of María…", "date_published": "2026-05-23T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/061/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/061/en", "title": "Everyday 061 — For Those Who Come After", "content_html": "A year ago, on a May afternoon, a family from Cabo Delgado had come to Felista's house. A man, a woman, three children. They had walked for nine days. They had nothing in their hands and nothing on their heads, because whoever leaves in a hurry leaves without a bundle.
Felista had cleared the corner of the yard sheltered by the lean-to. She had taken a mat from the chest. The mat was made of woven palm leaves, as long as a man lying down. The edge had worn away over the years. Felista had stitched it twice: once with black thread, once with red thread, because the black had run out.
She had unrolled the mat under the lean-to. The woman from Cabo Delgado had let her three children sleep on it. The family had stayed four months. The woman helped Felista pound the cassava in the mortar. The children had learned the way to the well. Then the family had found a settlement further south and had set off again. The mat had gone back into the chest. This was a year ago, in Felista's district, in the province of Nampula.
The news came slowly, over two weeks. At first it was news of Cabo Delgado, and Cabo Delgado was far away. Then the attacks crossed the province border. Then they reached the villages to the north of the district. In the end the news became the neighbours knocking at the door to say a single sentence: we are leaving.
On the radio they said a number. They said a hundred thousand people fleeing in two weeks. The number was large. Felista did not know how you hold a number like that in your hand. She knew how to count her own: three children, an elderly mother, herself. Five.
Her mother did not want to leave. An old woman measures distances in another way: not in kilometres, but in how many times she will have to sit down at the side of the road. Felista said only one thing to her. She reminded her that the family from Cabo Delgado, a year before, had walked nine days with three small children. Her mother did not answer. The next morning she was the first out onto the road.
The neighbours had left first. First the family in the house next door, then the one after that. They had left at dawn, in a line on the dirt road, with their bundles on their heads. Felista had watched them from the threshold.
The houses that emptied stayed standing, with their doors open. An empty house, in a time of flight, is not a house. It is a shelter waiting for someone. Felista had known this for exactly a year.
On the morning of departure, Felista packed the bundle. It is a procedure, and a procedure is done in order. She put in the cassava flour. She put in the blanket. She put in the document, wrapped in a plastic bag so the rain would not get it. She put in the salt. She put in the matches. She put in the big pot, then took it out. The pot weighed more than a child. A woman carrying the pot on her shoulder is not carrying the child on her shoulder. Felista left the pot on the hearth.
She counted again: the flour, the blanket, the document, the salt, the matches. Five things for five people. It was everything her hands could hold all the way south.
Then she went to the chest. She took out the mat.
The mat fitted into the bundle in a moment. It was light. It weighed less than the flour. Felista could have carried it for nine days without feeling its weight on her neck.
Felista did not put it in the bundle.
She went under the lean-to. She swept the floor of beaten earth with the sorghum broom, right into the corner. She swept it the way you sweep a room that is waiting for a guest. Then she unrolled the mat on the clean floor. She laid it out straight. She smoothed the mended edge, the stretch with black thread and the stretch with red thread. The mat stayed there, open, under the lean-to.
Felista knows who is walking the roads of the north now. She knows because a year ago she saw them arrive and she counted them: a man, a woman, three children, nine days, nothing in their hands. Someone will pass by this house left empty. They will stop in the shade of the lean-to. They will find a roof. They will find a mat laid out, ready, and they will understand that someone, before leaving, had thought of those who came after.
Felista put the bundle on her head. She took the youngest child by the hand. Her mother and the other two were already on the road.
On the threshold she stopped. She looked inside one last time. The hearth with the big pot. The lean-to. Under the lean-to, in the swept corner, the open mat.
She did not close the door. A closed door says the house has an owner and that the owner is coming back. Felista left the door ajar, the way you leave it for someone who still has to come in.
Then she took the dirt road south, behind her mother, with the bundle on her head and the child by the hand. Now she was one of the line. She was one of the hundred thousand.
", "summary": "A year ago, on a May afternoon, a family from Cabo Delgado had come to Felista's house. A man, a woman, three children. They had walked for nine days. They had nothing in their hands and nothing on…", "date_published": "2026-05-22T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/060/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/060/en", "title": "Everyday 060 — The Courtyard", "content_html": "We all knew him at the mosque, and we all called him Abu Ezz. The name on his ID was Mansour Kaziha. He was seventy-eight years old. He'd been the custodian since the mosque was built, back in the eighties. It's the largest mosque in San Diego, and he was there before the walls were.
Forty years in the same courtyard. Forty years keeping the same place in order. We knew that broomstick the way we knew him: worn down on one side only, because he always pushed in the same direction, and a broom, after forty years, takes the shape of the hand that holds it.
He opened the doors every morning in the same order. First the gate onto the street. Then the door to the main hall. Then the children's classrooms, one by one. He'd wet down the courtyard tiles before the heat came in, because he said a wet courtyard in the morning is a cool courtyard by noon. He greeted everyone who arrived by name. He knew the names of fathers, sons, and sons of sons.
A mosque, to someone who's never been inside one, is a building. To us, it was Abu Ezz's courtyard. He was the one who opened it when the sky was still grey. He was the one who locked it when the last of us had gone. Forty years, like that. A man who does the same thing for forty years doesn't do it with his hands anymore. He does it with his whole body, without thinking, the way you breathe. In forty years, every one of us had passed through that courtyard.
The eighteenth of May was a Monday, and it was morning. The children were in their classrooms, at their lesson, with the ones who taught them. At the entrance was Amin Abdullah, the security guard, fifty-one years old. In the courtyard was Abu Ezz, with his broom, like every morning for forty years. Nadir Awad, fifty-seven years old, hadn't arrived yet that morning. He lived across the street and came to pray every day.
That Monday the lesson had just begun. There were young children, the kind learning their first words. There were the older ones. There were those who'd come in late, and Abu Ezz had let them in, the way he always did, without scolding anyone.
Then two young men arrived at the gate. One was eighteen, the other seventeen. They were armed. Afterward, people found out about the video they'd been recording, the paper they'd written, the hatred they'd put into it. But that morning, in the courtyard, there were only two armed young men, and a door, and behind the door the children and the ones who taught them.
Abu Ezz had his door two steps away. He could have gone inside. He could have gone inside and bolted it behind him. A seventy-eight-year-old man with a broom, standing in front of two armed young men, had every reason in the world to take cover. No one would have blamed him. A custodian isn't a guard. A custodian keeps things clean, opens and closes doors. No rule told him to stay.
He didn't go inside.
He stayed in the courtyard. Amin Abdullah, from the entrance, had already moved toward the two young men. And from across the street, Nadir Awad heard the shots. A man who hears gunfire at the place where he prays every morning, where his wife teaches, doesn't count his steps. He crossed the street, came in through the gate, toward the sound and not away from it. There were three of them. They placed themselves between the gate and the classroom door. A custodian with a broom, a security guard, a man who'd come in from outside. Three men who made themselves slow, broad, loud. Three men who spoke to the young men, called out to them, filled the courtyard with their bodies and their voices. Every second those two young men spent with them, in the courtyard, was a second they didn't spend on the other side of that door.
We don't know what the three of them said, in the courtyard. We don't know if they said anything at all. We know what they did. They stayed. One second after another, they stayed.
Behind the door, in the classrooms, the staff kept the children down, still, silent. The children could hear the courtyard. They couldn't see it. They stayed where the ones who taught them had put them.
The two young men never reached the classrooms. In the courtyard they shot Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awad, and Mansour Kaziha. Then they turned their weapons on themselves. In the courtyard that morning, five people died. Three of them were ours.
Amin Abdullah was fifty-one years old. Nadir Awad was fifty-seven. Mansour Kaziha was seventy-eight. We write their names out in full, because a name written in full is a person, and three people, that Monday, stayed in the courtyard in our place.
Abu Ezz didn't see the children come out. They came out later, one by one, held by the hand by their teachers, through that door he had kept clear. They were alive. They are all alive.
The parents came to pick them up in the afternoon. Every child went home to a house. Every house that evening had someone to hold close. Three houses in San Diego did not.
The broom stayed in the courtyard, where it had fallen.
The next morning someone picked it up. A mosque is a place that someone opens at dawn and keeps clean, and three men, on the eighteenth of May, stayed in that courtyard so there would still be a place to open. We still do it, every morning. Someone picks up that broom, worn down on one side only, and wets down the courtyard tiles before the heat comes in. In the same order as always.
", "summary": "We all knew him at the mosque, and we all called him Abu Ezz. The name on his ID was Mansour Kaziha. He was seventy-eight years old. He'd been the custodian since the mosque was built, back in the…", "date_published": "2026-05-21T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/059/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/059/en", "title": "Everyday 059 — The Roll Call", "content_html": "Adesola arrived at seven forty. The school was a concrete room with a tin roof. Out front, the dirt road. Out back, a mango tree with dusty leaves. The door had no lock. The brass handle had been polished by Adesola on the first Monday of every month for seven years. Above the door, painted in red, was the name of the school: Owode Oja Community Nursery. The N in Nursery had lost its left leg to the sun.
The school was four kilometres from Ahoro Esinele. The village was called Owode Oja. Thirty houses. The mothers of Owode Oja brought their small children to Adesola's nursery and sent the older ones on foot to the school at Ahoro, which was a proper school, with uniforms, classrooms in six rows, a headmaster in a jacket even in the heat.
The night between the eighteenth and nineteenth of May, the armed men had come to the school at Ahoro. They had taken thirty-nine children and seven teachers. Children between two years old and sixteen. In Owode Oja the word came at four in the morning, over the small radios. Adesola's small radio was on the bedside table, beside her mother's wooden rosary.
Adesola was thirty-two years old. She had been teaching at the Owode Oja community nursery since she was twenty-four. Her father had been a teacher too, in Ilesa. He had told her, and he had told her many times, that the chairs of small children must be light, because a small child must not struggle to pull out a chair, and the effort of that first movement stays with you for years. Adesola had cleaned the chairs every Saturday. The chairs were yellow.
That morning of the nineteenth of May Adesola opened the door. She set the register on the desk. The desk was a small wooden table with three drawers. In the drawers: thirteen pencils, a cloth flag folded badly, a box of chalk, two clean handkerchiefs.
Adesola opened the window. The dirt road was empty. A goat crossed. A woman at the far end, a bucket on her head, moved slowly past. The woman did not look toward the school.
It was seven fifty-two. The mothers always came between seven fifty-five and eight-oh-five. The mothers came with the child on their back if the child was under two and by the hand if older. The mothers often stopped a moment to talk with Adesola: about the price of millet, about the roof the last rain had broken, about a mother-in-law getting worse. Adesola listened standing in the doorway. It was part of the work.
That morning nobody came. No mother came. No child came. Not even the water seller who every three days came round with his cart and stopped at the gate to say hello.
Adesola sat down behind the desk. She touched her veil. She stood up. She went to the door. She came back to the desk. She opened the register. The page for the nineteenth of May was blank.
Adesola thought — and this I am the one telling you now — that closing the school would have been easy. The door had no lock. It would have been easy to leave it just like that. Get on her bicycle. Go back to her mother's house, eight kilometres. Wait for Monday. See who came back.
Adesola did not close the school. Adesola wrote the date in the top right corner: nineteenth of May. Below the date, where every day she wrote attendance, she wrote the first name. She read it out loud.
— Adekunle.
She waited two seconds. No one raised a hand. Adesola wrote a dash. She said the second name.
— Bisola.
She waited. Dash. She said the third.
— Damilola.
Dash. She went on.
— Folake.
— Funmi.
— Gbenga.
— Ifeoma.
— Kemi.
— Olu.
— Olawale.
— Ronke.
— Sade.
— Segun.
— Taiwo.
— Tunde.
— Uche.
— Wale.
— Yetunde.
Yetunde was six years old. She sat in the third row, beside the wall. Yetunde had a small scar on her chin, a fall from a chair on the first day, and Adesola herself had pressed gauze to it, and from that day Yetunde had learned to pull the chair with her whole hand and not with two fingers. Adesola said Yetunde's name.
She waited. Nobody answered. Adesola wrote the dash.
Adesola closed the register. She understood that she had not taken attendance. She had called the names and she had waited. She had called the names and spoken them aloud in an empty classroom. She had called the names and the names had hung in the air for the length of a breath and then settled on the yellow chairs.
She had prayed. She knew it. She knew it while she was doing it. She had not let herself know it before.
Adesola stayed sitting. The desk was clean. The register was closed. Outside the dirt road went on empty. The mango tree cast a shadow that grew slowly on the east wall.
Half an hour had passed since the first name. Down the road, far off, at the bend, a figure appeared. It was a woman. She was walking slowly. Adesola waited. The woman was walking toward the school. The woman was holding something by the hand. It was a child. The child was small. Maybe four years old, maybe five.
Adesola stood up. She went to the door. She opened the door wider. She said nothing. She stood in the doorway. The woman was coming closer. The woman held the child by the hand. The child walked one step behind the woman, slowly.
Adesola opened the register again. She turned back to the page for the nineteenth of May. She waited for the woman to reach the gate.
", "summary": "Adesola arrived at seven forty. The school was a concrete room with a tin roof. Out front, the dirt road. Out back, a mango tree with dusty leaves. The door had no lock. The brass handle had been…", "date_published": "2026-05-20T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/058/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/058/en", "title": "Everyday 058 — Mazatán", "content_html": "Reyna Sántiz's water tank stood in the northwest corner of the courtyard, raised on four concrete blocks so the water would descend with a thread of pressure down to the jugs lined up underneath, and every morning, before the sun climbed above the neighbor's wall, Reyna filled the jugs and counted them aloud, one two three up to eleven, eleven twenty-liter jugs which was the measure of a day for her alone. The counting aloud had begun the year her husband left for Tijuana, so that the number eleven had become a way of saying the house still existed.
Mazatán is not the port, it is the small municipality on the Chiapas coast, between Tonalá and Tapachula, on the road that Central Americans have always taken because it is flat and follows the railway. In the twenty years spent in that courtyard, men from Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba had passed before Reyna's gate, and she had learned to recognize them not by their faces, which exhaustion makes identical, but by the way they drank. Those who are passing through drink with cupped hands, bent over the thread of water, without resting their lips on the rim of a jug that is not theirs.
One night in December two years earlier a white van had stopped right in front of the well, headlights off, and many had climbed out of it, perhaps forty, a long line that had bent over the tank in turns, with cupped hands, in silence, while two men who were not drinking stayed close to the doors. Reyna had watched from the window without turning on the light, and in the morning the van was gone, and the old road that leaves the town heading north, the one that runs along the mango fields before rejoining the railway, carried the wide tracks of a heavy vehicle that had turned in the mud.
The V Brigade entered Mazatán on the second Monday of May. They were mothers, mostly, and then siblings, and they came from Cuba, Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia, searching for a group of forty people who had disappeared at San José El Hueyate in December two years before. They walked along the main road, stopping at every gate, and at every gate they showed photographs nearly all laminated, because laminate holds against rain, sweat, the hands that have held them for two years.
Before Reyna's gate stopped a Cuban woman of sixty, who pulled from her bag a laminated photograph of a young man, and on the back, through the plastic, you could read a name written in marker and a date. The woman did not say much, she only asked whether that face had passed through here. Reyna kept her hand on the twisted wire that closed the gate in place of the broken latch, and instead of answering she offered water, went to fetch a glass, filled it from one of the eleven jugs, passed it through the bars.
The other doors along the road had stayed shut. Reyna could see this clearly from her gate: the mothers knocked, someone drew back a curtain, someone opened ten centimeters and then closed again. No one in Mazatán said anything, because whoever had disappeared forty people knew the roads, the houses, the relatives who remained, and because speaking to a passing mother brought no one back. Fear, in a small town, is not cowardice. It is a calculation that comes out even, every time you run it again.
Reyna watched the woman drink with hands cupped around the glass, bent, like someone who does not rest their lips on a rim that is not theirs. She wound the wire one turn tighter. She said that no, she did not remember that face, that in Mazatán too many faces pass through. Then, as the woman was putting the photograph back in her bag, Reyna added something else, in a low voice, counting the words the way she counted the jugs: that one night in December, two years before, there had been many of them drinking at her well, a long line, and that in the morning the old road heading north, the one along the mango fields, had carried the tracks of a heavy vehicle that had turned. She did not say the white van. She did not say the two men at the doors. She said the direction, and the direction was everything she could give without also giving the names of the houses beside hers.
The Cuban woman thanked her, wrote something in a notebook, and the brigade walked back up the road heading north, toward the mango fields, where after two years of rain no trace remained of any vehicle. After another two weeks in Chiapas and Mexico City the mothers would return to their countries empty-handed, because a direction is not a place, and a small trace is something you find and cannot read.
Reyna went back into the courtyard. It was ten o'clock, the sun was above the neighbor's wall. She refilled the jugs, because the woman had drunk from one, and counted them aloud, one two three up to eleven. In the plastic of the jug closest to the tank the water still trembled from the weight she had poured into it, a circle widening to the rim and coming back. Reyna stood watching it until the water was still again.
", "summary": "Reyna Sántiz's water tank stood in the northwest corner of the courtyard, raised on four concrete blocks so the water would descend with a thread of pressure down to the jugs lined up underneath, and…", "date_published": "2026-05-19T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/057/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/057/en", "title": "Everyday 057 — Setting the Table for Three", "content_html": "The mother was sleeping in the small room, the one that looked onto the courtyard, where the afternoon light came in at an angle Wijdan had learned to measure over the years the way you measure the breathing of someone who is sick—not by watching but by standing in the next room, knowing from the way the house held still whether the breath was there; the house was holding still in the right way now. In the kitchen the cabinet had a door that wouldn't close, from before Wijdan was born, a door the father had always said he would fix, that no one had fixed, so that inside the cabinet fine dust came in and settled on everything that wasn't used; almost nothing, in that house, was used the way it used to be. The radio sat on a shelf too high to reach, and to turn it on Wijdan climbed onto a stool every morning, because the radio was how Yemen came into the house, and for eleven years the Yemen that came into the house was a list of names read by an announcer with the same voice, the names of the living alongside the names of the others, because the radio doesn't know, when it reads, which name is which.
That morning the radio had said that in Amman, after fourteen weeks of negotiations, the parties had signed for the release of sixteen hundred detainees, the largest exchange in eleven years of war; and shortly after, not from the radio but from a cousin who had stopped by to speak quietly at the door so as not to wake the mother, word came that Saleh's name was perhaps on the list. Perhaps, because the list hadn't been confirmed, because lists over eleven years had swelled and collapsed, and Wijdan had watched the mother rise three times with a name in her mouth and three times sit back down; she knew, with the precision you know something learned on the body of another person, how much a hope weighs when it falls on someone who has few days left. The mother had few days left. The doctor hadn't said it in those words, he had said other words, but Wijdan had translated them, as she translated everything, into what could be done and what could not.
Saleh had been taken at twenty-two, at a checkpoint, for a reason the family had never been able to name exactly; and this, the impossibility of naming the reason, had been the hardest thing over the years, harder than having no news, because without a reason you cannot even build the sentence by which you explain a misfortune to yourself. The mother, who set a place for him, was the only one who had never asked for the reason, as though setting the table were her sentence, the sentence that needs no because: the place at the table held against every list, against every radio. For three years she had gone on saying his name as she set down the plate; then she had stopped saying his name, never stopped setting the plate. Wijdan, who for eleven years had been translating, who was the house's translator, the one who took the words of the doctor, the radio, the cousins, the neighbors, and reduced each one to a possible gesture, knew there was only one way that plate could return to the table that evening without becoming a lie or a wound: to return without a voice announcing it, like a question left for the mother.
Someone knocked. Wijdan opened the door and on the threshold was the neighbor, with the face of someone carrying something beautiful and anxious to set it down, and she said Saleh's name, said she had heard it on the afternoon radio, and moved to come in, because news like that you bring inside, you put it in the mother's hands. Wijdan stayed in the doorway. She didn't move aside. She said the mother was resting, that she would come by later, that thank you; she said it with the level voice with which in that house doors were closed without slamming, and the neighbor stopped, and turned back. Wijdan closed the door. Then she went to the cabinet, opened the door that wouldn't close, and took out Saleh's plate, which had been sitting there for eleven years in the same spot, with a ring of dust around the rim.
She set the table for three. She put down the mother's plate, her own, Saleh's plate; and with a dish towel she wiped the dust from the rim of the third plate, a thin ring that came away in a single stroke and left the ceramic the way Wijdan hadn't seen it in years. She didn't go to wake the mother. She would say nothing—not that the name was there, because it hadn't been confirmed, not that it wasn't, because perhaps it was. She would let the mother, when she rose, come into the kitchen, see the table, count the plates, and ask; then the question would belong to the mother, and the mother would have, until the answer came, her days.
The door to the small room stayed closed. On the table, meanwhile, there were three plates, and the third no longer had dust around the rim.
", "summary": "The mother was sleeping in the small room, the one that looked onto the courtyard, where the afternoon light came in at an angle Wijdan had learned to measure over the years the way you measure the…", "date_published": "2026-05-18T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/056/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/056/en", "title": "Everyday 056 — At Least You'll Be of Use", "content_html": "The room, which was a single room and looked onto the internal courtyard where at that hour the sun beat the concrete in such a way that the concrete gave the heat back upward, toward the windows, toward inside, held Sunita's work arranged in three piles: the pieces still to be finished, the pieces being worked on, the pieces done; and the finished pieces lay under a damp cloth, because Sunita kept them the way you keep something that needs to rest, even though a finished shirt has no need of rest, no more than the person who finished it does.
The trimming scissors were small, embroidery scissors. Sunita had wrapped one of the two rings with a strip of fabric, because the metal, in the heat of those days, burned to hold. Forty-seven degrees, they had said. Perhaps forty-eight.
Sunita's work consisted of taking away: every shirt that came out of the big factory arrived at her room with the excess threads, the threads the machine leaves at every seam, and the trade, hers, the only one her hands knew, was to go over every shirt, find every thread, cut it flush with the fabric without catching the fabric; and payment was by piece, not by hour; which means that the heat, which on an hourly wage would have been a burden shared among all, on a piece wage was entirely hers, unloaded whole onto her hands, which at forty-eight degrees moved more slowly; and the more slowly they moved, the fewer pieces ended up under the damp cloth, fewer pieces under the damp cloth meant fewer rupees when at five o'clock the thekedar came to count.
The thekedar counted the pieces and paid for the pieces; about the heat he said, when he said anything, that it was not his problem, and in this he had his reason, because the thekedar in turn delivered to someone who counted for himself, and so along a chain at whose end stood a shirt in a shop with a tag, and on that tag the heat of Delhi was not written.
That day the schools were closed. They had closed them for the heat, across the whole city, and so Roshni, who was ten years old, was at home; and a ten-year-old girl in a single room, with her mother working against an hour that is drawing near, does not stay long a girl who only watches. At a certain point Roshni had taken the second pair of scissors, the one without the fabric around the ring, had sat down beside the pile of pieces still to be finished, had begun.
Sunita counted the pieces under her breath, in Marathi, as her mother had counted; and counting the pieces in Marathi was something that came to her by itself, from before, from when the trimming scissors were not hers but were the ones her mother had put into her hands in another room, in another city, at the same age Roshni had now, ten years old, the same fingers, the same gesture of cutting flush without catching; and the thing her mother had said then, putting the scissors in her hands, had not been a cruel thing, it had been a practical thing, it had been: this way at least you learn, this way at least you're useful.
Sunita was counting, and she stopped on the number.
She stopped because the number she was counting included the pieces Roshni had finished. They were in the right pile. They were done well. Roshni had learned by watching, as everything is learned in a single room.
Sunita set down her scissors. She went to Roshni. She said nothing of what one says. She opened her fingers, one by one, took the second pair of scissors from her hand, the one without the fabric, the one that burned; and the pieces Roshni had finished she put back into the pile of those still to be done.
At five o'clock the thekedar came. He counted the pieces under the damp cloth. They were fewer than the agreed number, considerably fewer, because Sunita's hands, alone, at forty-eight degrees, had not made the number, and Roshni's pieces had gone back among those to be done. The thekedar paid what there was to pay for the pieces there were. He said that the next day, if the number did not come back, he would give the work to another house. Then he left with his count.
Sunita put the small scissors, the ones with the wrapped ring, under the damp cloth, beside the pieces that were resting and had no need of rest.
Roshni watched.
The radio from the courtyard, on in another room, was giving the evening news; and among the evening news was word that the heat would not drop, that the forty-eight degrees were holding, that the city's schools would stay closed the next day as well. The next day as well. And the next day the number would again fall short, Roshni would again be home, the scissors would again be two.
", "summary": "The room, which was a single room and looked onto the internal courtyard where at that hour the sun beat the concrete in such a way that the concrete gave the heat back upward, toward the windows,…", "date_published": "2026-05-17T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/055/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/055/en", "title": "Everyday 055 — Elongate", "content_html": "The house was mine and the men who slept in it, and the men changed, and in twelve years so many had passed through that I had stopped counting them, and what stayed the same were the six rooms upstairs and the kitchen downstairs, and the front staircase, and the iron staircase at the back that opened onto the alley. The men worked. They left early and came back tired, and sometimes I wouldn't see their faces for days, but I saw their shoes, they left their shoes on the landing, and I knew the men more by their shoes than by their faces, and in the evenings I knew who had come home by looking at the landing. Tomás had been with me for nine years. He was the one who had stayed the longest, and he fixed the faucet and the hinge and the shutter when it wouldn't come down right, and his work jacket hung on the coatrack in the entrance hall, low down, where he left it when he came in, and where I saw it every time I went up or down the stairs.
That morning was a morning like any other, and that is the thing I cannot get out of myself, that it was a morning like any other. I had turned on the kitchen radio, low, the way I always do, because I don't like the house when it's empty and silent, and upstairs the men were having breakfast before their shift, and you could hear the water in the pipes and a chair scraped back and footsteps, and on the landing there were the shoes of the ones who hadn't left yet, and I was counting them with my eyes without even realizing it, because I had been doing it for twelve years. Then they knocked.
They don't knock the way someone knocks who is looking for a room. They knock in a different way, and you recognize that way the first time you hear it, even if you've never heard it before. I went to the door, and in the hallway I passed the coatrack with Tomás's jacket hanging low, the way it did every morning, and I opened the door just enough, and on the threshold there were two men, and one of them was holding a sheet of paper, and the paper was a list of names, and he held it toward me so I could read it, and he asked me which rooms were occupied and by whom. I have spent my life minding my own business. It is the thing I do best. For twelve years I had rented rooms to men I asked nothing about, and not knowing was my trade, and it was convenient, and it was also a way of respecting them.
And so I did the only thing I know how to do when I don't know what to do, which is talk. I started talking. I said that the house was old, that I had taken it in two thousand and thirteen, that there were six rooms but one had damp and I didn't rent it out, and that the man I had rented that room to before had left two months' debt behind, and I told them about the debt, the figures, everything, and I asked whether they happened to know how you go about recovering a debt like that, and all the while I was holding the door with my hand, neither open nor closed, and Tomás's jacket was right there within reach, low down on the right, and I was talking, and I was starting my sentences over the way I do when I'm embarrassed, and the embarrassment that morning I did not have to invent. I was talking for the two of them, on the threshold. But I was also talking for the ones upstairs. Because upstairs, I knew, there was the iron staircase at the back, and a voice in an old house carries through walls, and if I talked loudly enough and long enough, upstairs they would understand one thing only: that there was someone at the door, and that it was not the moment for shoes on the landing. I did not lie. I did not give a false name. I only stretched things out, and stretching things out is not lying, and I kept telling myself that while I was stretching them out.
By the time I let them in, upstairs it was already something else. They went up, they opened the rooms one by one, and the rooms were almost all empty, with the beds still warm, and a window at the back left open, and the iron staircase that when you touched it was still trembling a little. On the landing there were no shoes. The men had carried them in their hands as they came down, so as not to make noise, and this thing, the men coming down an iron staircase holding their shoes in their hands so as not to make noise in my house, is a thing I cannot get out of my head. Tomás had come down with the others. I just had time to see him from the kitchen window, at the far end of the alley, walking fast and not running, because running, he had told me once, is the thing that gets you noticed.
His work jacket had stayed on the coatrack in the entrance hall. Low down. Where he left it. It is still there now, and I have not moved it, and every morning I come down the stairs and I see it, low down on the right, and every morning for a second it is as if Tomás had come back in and was about to fix my shutter, and then no, and the shutter keeps not coming down right, and I do not move the jacket.
", "summary": "The house was mine and the men who slept in it, and the men changed, and in twelve years so many had passed through that I had stopped counting them, and what stayed the same were the six rooms…", "date_published": "2026-05-16T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/054/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/054/en", "title": "Everyday 054 — Never Returned", "content_html": "The researcher arrived in Uvira in March. She had come for the report. The report would come out in May. In March it was still a thing to be done, and the thing to be done was this: to speak with people, one at a time, and to write down what they said.
The woman received her at home, in the front room, the one with the door onto the street. The door was wood, with an iron bolt that was drawn from inside. The researcher sat at the table. She opened a notebook. She set the notebook on the table and a pen beside the notebook. She said the woman could stop whenever she wished. She said she could decline to answer a question and move on to the next.
The woman offered something to drink. The researcher accepted. This was the beginning, and the beginning had to be done in this order.
Then the researcher started with the dates. The dates were fixed, she already had them from other interviews. The M23 forces and the Rwandan soldiers had entered Uvira on the tenth of December. They had remained until the seventeenth of January. Thirty-eight days. During those days, in the woman's neighborhood, fighters had gone house to house. They knocked. They asked about men and boys. They said they were looking for anyone with ties to the militias that had sided with the government.
The researcher explained how the report worked. It would be twenty-three pages. Behind the twenty-three pages were one hundred and twenty interviews, and the woman's was one of the one hundred and twenty. The report would count three things: people executed, women raped, people taken away. For each of the three things there would be a number.
The researcher had a method, and the method was always the same. First the large facts, the ones that do not change: the dates of the occupation, the units, the names of the commanders. Then the facts of the neighborhood: who had passed through which street, on which day. Then, only at the end, the facts of the house. You moved from the wide to the narrow, from the city to the room, and you arrived at the door last. The woman recognized that method without having studied it. She understood it from the order of the questions.
Then the researcher asked the woman to tell her about her night. Everyone had a night. The woman's night had been between the sixth and seventh of January.
The woman told it in objects. She said that at that hour the radio was on, at low volume, on a frequency that played only music. She said her husband had gotten out of bed. She said someone had knocked at the door three times. Three blows, a pause, and then nothing more. The husband had gone to the door barefoot. He had drawn the bolt himself. This the woman said precisely: the bolt had been drawn by him, from inside, with his own hand. Then she told about the street, the sound of the engine, the time she had read from a clock. She told everything that surrounded it. She left the center empty.
The researcher was writing. She wrote quickly. She skipped nothing. At a certain point she stopped. She said that for the report she needed one thing. She needed the man's name and the date. Without the name, she said, the man remained inside a number. The number, for the people taken away and never returned, was twelve. Every name written in the report took a man out of the number, placed him among the people with a name.
The woman did not answer at once.
Since January the woman had been cooking for one and a half. Not for two, because her husband was not at the table. Not for one, because saying one was something she had never done. It was a quantity that did not close the door. As long as she cooked for one and a half, her husband was a man who could still come home at night and knock. She would count the blows. She would know them.
Giving the name to the report was another thing. The name in the report stood in the row of the twelve people taken away and never returned. Never returned were two words already written, and the name went beneath them.
The researcher waited. The pen was still on the notebook. She did not press. She only waited, with the pen still, and that was her way of asking. She had done one hundred and nineteen interviews before this one. She knew that the name comes or it does not come, and that pushing does not help.
The woman said her husband's name. She said it in full, the given name and both family names. Then she said the date: the night between the sixth and seventh of January.
The researcher wrote the name. She wrote the date. She read back aloud what she had written, so the woman could confirm, and the woman confirmed. The researcher closed the notebook.
Then she stood. The woman walked her to the door. She drew the bolt, the same bolt, and opened the door. Outside it was March, it was afternoon, there was the full light of the street. The woman stood at the threshold until the researcher had reached the far end of the street. Then she went back inside. The door, that afternoon, she left open.
", "summary": "The researcher arrived in Uvira in March. She had come for the report. The report would come out in May. In March it was still a thing to be done, and the thing to be done was this: to speak with…", "date_published": "2026-05-15T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/053/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/053/en", "title": "Everyday 053 — Mariama", "content_html": "I am forty-seven years old. I have been working in Lampedusa for four years. Before Lampedusa I was in Catania, in general surgery, and in Catania, on a November morning, I had a panic attack in the operating room while I was about to clamp a hemostat, and after that day I requested a transfer and they gave it to me.
In Lampedusa I thought the sea would bring peace. I thought that at least the sea you know, you see it, you know what it does. In four years I have counted corpses fourteen times. Today the fifteenth arrived.
It was thirteen forty. The patrol vessel CP three-twenty-two had hooked the boat at three in the morning, eighty-five miles from Lampedusa, in the Libyan SAR zone. For ten hours it had held course toward the harbor through driving rain, and when they brought it in the radio of CP three-twenty-two said only: "Eighteen confirmed dead, five alive. Hypothermia." I climbed into the empty ambulance and waited at the Favarolo dock with Vincenzo, who is the island's forensic physician and who is sixty years old and wearing a grey shirt.
I counted. Number one, male, fifties. Number two, male, thirties. Number three, pregnant female. Number four, child. Number five, child. Number six, child. I stopped. Vincenzo looked at me. I went on. Number seven male. Number eight female. Number nine male. Number ten female. Number eleven male. Number twelve female thirties, red dress with white flowers, wound at the temple, braided hair. Number thirteen male. And so on through eighteen, a thin boy with white trainers still laced.
The five survivors were placed on the other tarp, four metres from the eighteen. Three weak adults with swollen feet and hollow eyes, one critical woman with a cut on her thigh losing blood slowly, and a child in respiratory arrest, who appeared to be ten years old and who had been pulled out last because he was under two adult bodies, and when Andrea, the patrol vessel commander, lifted him from the bottom of the boat, beneath his back there were two broken headphones, an empty water bottle, an identity card with no photograph. The Frontex mediator was a Senegalese man from Saint-Louis who speaks Wolof, and when he looked at the child and then at number twelve he said to Vincenzo: "Same dress, in small. Under the child's shoes there is a red cloth with white flowers." Mother and son.
Vincenzo came close to me. He had the forensic form in his hand, and eighteen pre-printed lines, and a ballpoint pen, and eyes a little red, but not from the sun. He said to me: "Carmela, you decide. I already have the form to sign for the eighteen."
Vincenzo is a decent man. Vincenzo was giving me the child.
I look at him. The skin is ashen but warm. The chest rises a few millimetres, every four seconds. The pulse oximeter reads sixty-two, sixty-one, sixty. I can intubate him here, on the tarp of the Favarolo dock, beside number twelve who is his mother, and who still has no name. I can load him into the ambulance, twelve minutes to the island's polyclinic, mobile oxygen, some chance.
My hands open the intubation kit before my head has finished thinking. I open the tube. Tube number five, diameter for a ten-year-old child. The laryngoscope blade is already fitted. Vincenzo says quietly: "Yes." I do not look at him. I crouch down. I tilt the child's head. I open the mouth. I insert the blade. I see the vocal cords on the second attempt, I pass the tube, I inflate the cuff. I connect the Ambu. The saturation climbs to seventy-two, to seventy-eight, to eighty-four. Vincenzo says quietly: "Good."
The ambulance is ready. The child is loaded onto the stretcher, in induced coma, intubated, with another nurse beside him. The driver, Sandro, has the engine running.
I stay on the tarp. My hands are trembling. I count my breaths. I was already doing it before, even in Catania, even after the good operating rooms. I reach forty-nine. I stand. I walk toward the patrol vessel CP three-twenty-two, across the eighteen tarps laid out in parallel. The patrol vessel commander is Andrea, he is thirty years old, fisherman's hands. I ask him: "Number twelve, female thirties, red dress. Do you have a name?"
Andrea checks the notebook. He says: "We don't. Someone said: Mariama. I don't know if it's her. There were seventy-seven of them on board."
Mariama.
I return to the child's tarp. The tarp is empty, the child is in the ambulance stopped ten metres away. But his shirt has been left on the tarp, a yellow shirt with a dog drawn in pencil. I take a permanent marker from my pocket, walk to the ambulance, signal to Sandro to wait one more moment, climb in, uncover the child's left wrist, and write: Mariama. Seven letters. The R is a little crooked.
Sandro looks at me. He says: "Sure?" I say: "Sure." I climb down. The ambulance leaves at fourteen twelve.
I return to the dock. Vincenzo is signing the form with eighteen lines. He does not look at me. Then he looks. He nods.
The patrol vessel CP three-twenty-two leaves the harbor at eighteen thirty for another sighting, six miles to the south. On the dock the eighteen tarps remain, the rags, the open intubation kit. On the left wrist of a child who is now at the island's polyclinic I have left seven letters in marker.
Mariama. The R crooked.
", "summary": "I am forty-seven years old. I have been working in Lampedusa for four years. Before Lampedusa I was in Catania, in general surgery, and in Catania, on a November morning, I had a panic attack in the…", "date_published": "2026-05-14T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/052/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/052/en", "title": "Everyday 052 — Twenty-Three", "content_html": "Mei Lin crosses the courtyard of Guandu Elementary School Number Seven at six forty in the morning having counted the hundred and forty-two steps from the parking lot to the entrance, a hundred and forty-two because she had counted them on the phone the day before, when the clerk at the Liuyang District Security Bureau had told her that her father was number twenty-three and that the identification would take place on the morning of May fifth at the requisitioned school; because counting was her way of keeping her distance from things that asked for something else, the way she measured the distance between her desk in Shanghai and the office window (eight meters forty) or measured the days since her father's last phone call (two hundred and forty-six, calculated with the lunar calendar open on the living room table), and when her father, the last time, during the March visit, had handed her his left blue plastic sandal and asked her to glue the sole back on because it had come loose, and Mei Lin had glued it twice in a row with the heavy adhesive used for floors, telling him "that'll hold until June, then you can buy a new pair," and her father had answered: "glue it well, I need to make it to June."
The local bureau official comes to meet her in the courtyard and is fifty-three years old, a blue notebook in hand, and a name tag sewn onto his shirt that reads his surname: Wang. Wang guides her toward a row of black bags resting on school tables lined up along the east wall of the courtyard; each bag has a paper tag tied to its handle with white string, and Mei Lin notices immediately, as she walks and counts the bags (one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two), that some tags have a name written on them and others only a number; bag number twenty-three is the first in the second row and has a tag that reads only: 23. Wang explains, as he lifts the zipper of the bag with a slow gesture she reads as professionally compassionate: "For the twenty-three on whom a document was found beside the body we have the name. For the others, family identification; signature on the form, and the case is closed. Transfer to the county funeral home is the family's responsibility: the director of Huasheng has been detained, the company is suspended." He adds: "The company had been fined in January: fifteen thousand yuan for two violations in workshop four, they were mixing reducing and oxidizing agents in the same laboratory." He says it as a concession, as though the data justified the procedure.
The sandal emerges from the open bag: the left blue sandal with the sole glued twice. Mei Lin leans down, not to identify it—identification is a verb that presupposes a doubt, and she has no doubt—but to check whether the right one is inside the bag as well. Wang watches her. Mei Lin asks: "And the right one?" Wang shakes his head: "We didn't find it." Behind him, on the far side of the courtyard, the clerk managing the identification queue calls the next number: "Twenty-four." An elderly woman detaches herself from the waiting group and walks toward a bag in the third row. Mei Lin hears her shoes on the gravel.
Then Mei Lin turns to Wang and says: I would like you to write my father's name on the tag; above the number, before the signature. Wang looks at her for two seconds without answering, then consults the blue notebook as though searching for a specific page, although Mei Lin understands he is not searching for anything—he is taking time, procedural time, because the request is not provided for by the form, which has a field for "number" and a field for "family member's signature" and a field for "family member's identity document" but no field for "name of the deceased above the number"; the compilation manual does not prohibit the thing, it simply does not provide for it. The queue clerk calls: "Twenty-five." A man detaches himself from the group. Wang says: "All right." He takes out a ballpoint pen, a blue Parker with a gold cap that strikes her as out of place in that courtyard, and writes in precise characters above the figure 23 the three characters of the name: 刘建华. Liu Jianhua. Then he passes her the form. The clerk calls: "Twenty-six." Another elderly woman walks toward a bag. Mei Lin signs. The handwriting of the signature belongs to someone who counts the strokes of each character before writing them, eleven strokes for the surname, seven strokes for the second character of the given name, eight for the third; Mei Lin always counts.
Wang closes the bag. Two assistants carry it to the van that Mei Lin's cousin in Liuyang rented for the transport: an old Wuling Hongguang with the flatbed covered by a green tarpaulin. The bag takes up the back seat. Mei Lin gets in front. On the passenger seat, beside the bag behind her, she sets down something she has been holding in her hand since she left the courtyard: the left blue sandal. She took it from the bag before Wang closed it, without anyone seeing her, because there were no surveillance cameras in that courtyard—Mei Lin had checked at the entrance—and because Wang was already signing his own report in the blue notebook. The odometer on the dashboard reads 84,317. Her cousin has not arrived yet. Mei Lin waits ten minutes.
The bag's tag is still visible from the passenger seat, attached to the handle with white string; the tag shows the name—Liu Jianhua—and below it the number, because Wang had not crossed out the 23, he had only written the name above it. They coexist. The left sandal is on the seat beside her. The right one is not there.
", "summary": "Mei Lin crosses the courtyard of Guandu Elementary School Number Seven at six forty in the morning having counted the hundred and forty-two steps from the parking lot to the entrance, a hundred and…", "date_published": "2026-05-13T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/051/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/051/en", "title": "Everyday 051 — Postscript", "content_html": "I washed my hands at the sink in the corridor of the Rescue 1122 center in Buner, under the tap to the left of the reagent cabinet, and the water coming out was lukewarm because on the morning of the eleventh of May two thousand twenty-six the center's boiler was still working, and the white marble dust that had stayed under my fingernails came away slowly and mixed with Nawab's blood that had stayed on my right wrist where I had held pressure while we hoisted him onto the stretcher, and there was also the sweat from the undershirt beneath the orange jumpsuit, and all of this came away, and I was not thinking any of the things I thought later.
It was thirteen twelve. I was returning from the Bampokha quarry. Five workers extracted alive, all five transported to PHQ Daggar, ambulance departed at twelve forty. The team had come back behind me on foot from the van. Faryad was carrying the kit case, Tariq was carrying the Husqvarna chainsaw, the other two new boys from the center were chatting about the drama serial they had watched the night before. I was not chatting. I went to the paperwork counter.
The INCIDENT REPORT form we use is in English and Urdu, two columns. I had the names of the five written in the notebook from my side pocket: Niaz Muhammad of Swat, Gul Syed of Aligram, Inaam of Gagra Buner, Faryad of Buner city, Nawab Khan of Swabi. I transferred the five names onto the form, one below the other, with the blue pen from the desk, and in the line "Outcome" I wrote "Rescue successful, 5/5 alive transported to PHQ Daggar." I signed. They call me Aziz and this is my name.
I went to the kitchen. The rice had been ready for half an hour, the dal was lukewarm, Faryad had set the table for five but the two new boys ate outside in the courtyard. I sat at the long table. Tariq said "good work boss" and I nodded. I telephoned my wife Salma. I told her only that I had returned and that I would rest before the afternoon shift. Salma asked me if I had eaten, I told her yes even though I was just beginning to eat. She hung up.
The central telephone rang at thirteen forty-six. It was PHQ Daggar. The voice was Dr. Imran's, I have known him for four years. He told me "Aziz bhai, the patient Nawab Khan, internal injuries, he didn't make it, death at thirteen forty-six." I said "shukria." He also told me "the father is arriving from Swabi in the afternoon." I said "shukria" a second time. I hung up.
I went to the counter. The form I had filled out was in the report register, second sheet of the green folder "May 2026." I found it. I opened it. The blue signature was at the bottom, my five lines above. I opened the pen holder. I pulled out a black Pilot permanent ink pen, the kind we use for addenda because blue gets confused with the original signature. Below my signature, I wrote: "Addendum — thirteen forty-six hours: patient Nawab Khan deceased at PHQ Daggar from internal injuries. Team recovered alive. Survival reclassified: 4 of 5." Below, a second signature with the same black pen.
I closed the register. I put it back on the shelf, in its place, between the April register and the May shift notebook.
I went to the archive. The archive is three metal shelving units against the wall of the back room, above a radiator that in May is off. The folder I was looking for is "Rescue 2026 — Buner / Khyber Pakhtunkhwa," third shelf row from the top, third unit from the left. I pulled out the yellow carbon copy of the report from the new register I had just closed. I opened the folder. I inserted the sheet in chronological order, after the 7th of May (minor landslide on the Pacha Kalay road, "Rescue successful 3/3") and before the 12th of May which was tomorrow.
While I was inserting it I looked at the other reports of the month. Ten interventions in May before mine. Seven with "Rescue successful 5/5." One with "Rescue successful 3/3." One with "Rescue successful 3/4." Two with "Rescue successful 0/2." My new report, the eleventh of May, said "Rescue successful 4/5." I placed it in its numerical position in the sequence.
I closed the folder. I returned to the counter. The shift register was open to my page. I did not write anything. I thought of the row of the month's reports that now I had before my eyes without having to reopen the folder: the seven five-of-fives from the clean rescues, the three-of-three from the Pacha Kalay landslide, the two zero-of-twos from the mountains we had not reached in time, the three-of-four from the fire of the thirtieth of April that had spilled into May, and my four-of-five from the eleventh. It was the only datum of the month that had been corrected after the fact. It was the first number of a sequence that began in May of two thousand twenty-six and that will continue until the day I stop filling out the reports. I went to rest before the afternoon shift.
", "summary": "I washed my hands at the sink in the corridor of the Rescue 1122 center in Buner, under the tap to the left of the reagent cabinet, and the water coming out was lukewarm because on the morning of the…", "date_published": "2026-05-12T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/050/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/050/en", "title": "Everyday 050 — On record", "content_html": "It is recorded. Pediatric emergency room, Kharkiv regional hospital, three in the morning, Wednesday, May sixth, two thousand twenty-six. Three children arrived at two forty. All three with fragment wounds, Shahed drone, explosion on Saltivska Street, sixth floor of an eight-story building, residential district. The nurse at the triage desk is named Olha, forty-seven years old, eighteen hours into her shift, a cup of cold tea beside the monitor.
It is recorded that the attending physician, Dr. Petrenko, has been in the operating room since two twenty with a pregnant woman, emergency delivery, placental abruption, obstetric code red. Room two is occupied until further notice. Room one is free. The other nurse, Ivanna, is upstairs in pediatrics on the fourth floor, setting up the three cots.
It is recorded that the three children are in three parallel cots, separated by transparent plastic curtains.
Cot A. Girl, three years old, name written on the chart in Cyrillic characters, Polina. Pale skin, eyes open, not screaming, abdomen pulled upward, monitor shows heart rate eighty-eight. Olha sees it.
Cot B. Boy, seven years old, name Sasha. Light blue nightshirt, open wound on right thigh, metal fragment visible, compression applied by parents during transport. He is holding a black plastic remote control, the kind for infrared toy cars, with two arrows and a dial. Heart rate is one hundred forty-two. Compensating.
Cot C. Boy, five years old, name Maksym. Right shoulder, fragment, screaming at regular intervals. Heart rate one hundred thirty. Compensating.
Olha knows that those who scream compensate. Knows that those who do not scream do not compensate. The three-year-old girl is the worst sign. The three-year-old girl is the one who should go in first. She knows it from her hands before her head.
It is recorded that hospital protocol states that operative triage, the decision of who enters the room first, is made by the physician. The nurse stabilizes, positions, monitors. The nurse does not decide who.
Olha looks at the phone on the desk. The phone light is off. Dr. Petrenko will not answer in the next ten minutes. Maybe twenty. The pregnant woman in room two is hemorrhaging.
She approaches cot B. Sasha is holding the remote control with both hands, knuckles white, fingertips yellowish. His eyes are fixed on the ceiling, not on his thigh. The boy is still playing. He is playing with a remote control without the car. He is playing so he does not look at his leg.
"Sasha." Olha speaks softly, in Ukrainian. "You have to give me the remote control. Now we have to do the X-ray. You cannot have metal things on you."
Sasha does not let go. Does not speak. Olha bends down. Places one hand over his. Her hand is large, Sasha's hands are small. She pries one finger loose. Then another. The remote control falls onto the sheet. Sasha opens his hand. Keeps looking at the ceiling.
Olha takes the remote control. Looks at it for an instant. Black plastic, the arrows, the dial. She sets it on the cart beside the cot. Turns toward cot A.
It is recorded that the red call-physician button, on Polina's monitor, is pressed by Olha at three fourteen and seconds not recorded. It is recorded that the orderly on duty, Andriy, arrives at cot A at three fourteen and forty. It is recorded that Olha tells him, voice steady, operative code, "take her to room one. Now. Abdominal obstruction, suspected. Notifying Dr. Petrenko via intercom."
It is recorded that Andriy looks at Olha for half a second. Then releases the brake on Polina's cot. Pushes it toward the corridor. The door to room one opens. Closes.
It is recorded that at three eighteen Polina enters the room. At three twenty Dr. Petrenko, finished with the delivery, reaches room one. Opens the chart. Looks at Polina's abdomen. Confirms Olha's diagnosis. Begins.
It is recorded that at three twenty-two Olha returns to cot B. Sasha is still there. The thigh keeps bleeding. Olha picks up the remote control from the cart, turns it between her fingers. Bends over the boy. "I left you without it, Sasha."
Sasha looks at the ceiling.
"Sasha, can you hear me?"
Sasha does not speak. Sasha does not answer. Sasha does not look at Olha.
Olha places the remote control under his right hand, gently, fingers relaxed on the sheet. Sasha's hand does not close. Olha waits. Counts to five in her head, then to ten. Sasha's hand does not close on the remote control.
Olha pulls hers back. Goes to cot C, to Maksym who has stopped screaming and is now crying softly. Presses the call button for the second orderly. Raises the IV bag.
It is recorded that at three twenty-eight Dr. Petrenko exits room one. Polina is stable. Sasha enters the room at three thirty. When the orderly lifts him from the cot, the remote control stays on the sheet, beside the white crease left by the body.
Olha takes it. Puts it in the pocket of her uniform. Goes to the sink. Washes her hands. It is recorded that she washes them for forty-five seconds, counted. It is recorded that afterward she does not dry them right away.
It is recorded that Sasha's father arrives at three fifty. It is recorded that Olha will give him the remote control at four ten.
", "summary": "It is recorded. Pediatric emergency room, Kharkiv regional hospital, three in the morning, Wednesday, May sixth, two thousand twenty-six. Three children arrived at two forty. All three with fragment…", "date_published": "2026-05-11T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/049/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/049/en", "title": "Everyday 049 — Asphalt", "content_html": "The motorbike is overturned on the asphalt. The front wheel is still spinning. The father lies six meters from the girl. The girl is sitting on the asphalt. The drone cannot be seen. It can be heard.
The drone is called Heron. It is at four hundred meters altitude. The first strike arrived seven seconds ago.
The girl is twelve years old. Her name is Salam. She touches her head. Under her hair there is something wet. She looks at her palm. The palm is red.
The asphalt is hot. It is noon. It is Saturday, May 9. The road is the one that leads to the Nabatieh market. Salam takes it in the morning with her father.
The father's name is Yusuf. He is Syrian, from Daraa. He has lived in Nabatieh since 2022. He works as a mason.
Yusuf says "stop."
The drone hums. It moves closer. It moves away. It does not leave.
Salam's jeans are new. Her mother bought them at the Thursday market. They were on sale. The left knee is broken, the jeans are torn. Above the right eyebrow there is a wound three centimeters long.
Yusuf is breathing. The white shirt rises and falls.
Yusuf says "stop" again. The voice is low.
Salam looks at her father. The drone is still there.
In Nabatieh, today, the drone also struck on a road in Bedias. There a man died. Thirteen are wounded. Six are children. Two are women.
In Nabatieh, today, the drone strikes motorbikes twice. Three times if the motorbikes stop.
The father is silent.
Salam puts her right hand on the asphalt. The asphalt burns her palm. She pulls herself with her elbow. She moves her right leg. She drags herself one meter.
The drone's hum does not change.
Salam drags herself another meter.
The father is silent.
Salam drags herself another meter. She is three meters from Yusuf.
She sees better. Yusuf's eyes are open. He is looking at the sky. On the white shirt there is a red stain that is spreading.
She drags herself again. She is two meters away.
The hum changes. It rises an octave. The hum is the one from the first strike.
Yusuf says a word. Salam does not hear it: the hum is too close.
Salam reaches out her hand. She touches her father's hand. Her father's hand is warm.
The second strike arrives.
When it arrives, Salam is saying her father's name. She says it once. She says it a second time. The second time she does not finish it.
Thirty-two seconds after the second strike, the third arrives. The third is the one that will operate on Salam's head, abdomen, right thigh. Salam arrives at Nabih Berri hospital in Nabatieh at twelve eighteen.
Yusuf died at the second strike. Salam will die after the operation.
The number of dead, in southern Lebanon, Saturday, May 9, at twenty-two hundred, is thirty-nine. Yusuf is one. Salam not yet.
The Israeli army declared it is verifying the incident.
Yusuf's white shirt had been washed Wednesday. Salam, on Wednesday afternoon, had helped her mother hang it on the terrace. The clothesline was stretched between the kitchen wall and the concrete pillar of the terrace. The shirt had taken two hours to dry. Her mother had told Salam not to touch the shirt while it was still wet, because the white cuff got dirty easily. Salam had not touched it.
In Nabatieh, Saturday, May 9, at twelve seventeen, the asphalt of the market road was hot like June.
Three days earlier, in the living room, Yusuf had checked the calendar on the kitchen wall and had told Salam that on Saturday the 9th they would go to the market to buy the onions and the bread. He had said the onions and the bread, in that order, because onions cost more than bread and Yusuf preferred to buy what cost more first. It was a rule of his. Salam knew it.
The motorbike was a Honda CG 125. Yusuf had bought it secondhand in 2023 from a mechanic in Nabatieh named Hassan. He had paid six hundred fifty American dollars in four installments. The plate was Lebanese. Yusuf did not have a Lebanese license, he had a Syrian license. The Syrian license, in Lebanon, is valid for urban travel.
Salam, on the motorbike, sat behind her father, with her arms around his waist. Salam's arms, on the market road on May 9 at twelve seventeen, had been around Yusuf's waist until the moment of the first strike.
The fruit seller at the Nabatieh market, Saturday, May 9 at twelve twenty-five, sold onions to a woman from Bedias. The woman paid with a ten-thousand Lebanese lira note and received two thousand five hundred in change. The fruit seller did not hear the first strike. He heard the third. He stopped weighing.
The Israeli army conducted, Saturday, May 9, according to data from the Lebanese ministry of health updated at twenty-two hundred the same day, eighty-nine strikes on Lebanese territory. Thirty-nine civilian victims. Seventeen seriously wounded. Six of the wounded are children.
Salam, in surgery, at twelve forty-three, says her father's name. She says it once. She says it a second time. The second time she does not finish it.
", "summary": "The motorbike is overturned on the asphalt. The front wheel is still spinning. The father lies six meters from the girl. The girl is sitting on the asphalt. The drone cannot be seen. It can be heard.…", "date_published": "2026-05-10T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/048/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/048/en", "title": "Everyday 048 — The Three Keys of the Phone", "content_html": "Ploy Thongsuk, twenty-nine years old, dispatcher four months into the job at the Foodpanda Sukhumvit dispatch center, third night shift of the week. Air-conditioned room, white fluorescent lights, three rows of desks, six dispatchers per shift. In front of her, the screen showing the Bangkok map, the red dots of riders out on deliveries. Samsung work phone on the desk. Three dedicated buttons: white for the customer, green for the rider, red for the supervisor. Eighteen thousand baht a month. Mother with diabetes back in Nakhon Pathom, retired father who sleeps through the day.
It's three twelve in the morning. Order 4471 has been out for delivery eighteen minutes. Should have been twelve. The rider's dot is sitting still in front of the Rangsit campus. Ploy hits the green button. The rider doesn't pick up. She tries again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Five calls. Silence.
She opens the service manual. Page 7: if the rider doesn't answer after three calls, contact the customer, apologize, offer a refund, close the order. Page 9: if there are signs of an emergency, contact the supervisor. Emergency signs are not defined. The manual doesn't say what a sign looks like. The manual only says what to do if one exists.
Ploy watches the rider's dot. Still. Doesn't move. On the Bangkok map, in front of the Rangsit campus, at three thirteen in the morning, a red dot that doesn't move could be a lot of things. Could be a dead battery. Could be a break. Could be the rider delivered and forgot to update. Could be something else.
The customer, somewhere in Bang Phlat, is typing in the chat: "where are you?" Then: "hello?" Then: "??". The messages keep coming.
Ploy hits the red button. Khun Anan picks up, the shift supervisor. Voice of someone who hasn't slept in three hours.
"Rider 4471 stationary at Rangsit for eighteen minutes. Not answering. I'm sending a check team."
"You called three times?"
"Five."
"Follow the manual. Page 7. Refund the customer. Close the order. Open a rider ticket tomorrow morning."
"Khun Anan, it's the middle of the night. Rangsit. He's not answering. I can send another rider to take a look."
"Follow the manual. Page 7."
Ploy hangs up. She looks at the work phone. The green button. The red button. The white button. Three buttons to shrink the world down to three answers.
She opens the shift's internal chat. Writes to Mai, dispatcher over at Lat Phrao, two desks down.
"Mai. Can you send a rider to Rangsit to check on something? Rider 4471 hasn't moved in eighteen minutes. Not picking up."
Mai reads it. Replies ten seconds later.
"Yeah. Sending 6612. Five minutes."
Ploy hits the white button. Calls the customer in Bang Phlat.
"Good evening, ma'am. This is Foodpanda dispatch. Your rider has run into a problem. We're going to refund your order. We're asking for ten minutes."
"What kind of problem?"
"He's not answering his phone. We're sending someone to check."
"Okay."
Ploy hangs up. She watches the screen. Rider 4471's dot, still. Rider 6612's dot pulling out from Lat Phrao. The Bangkok map at night is red dots moving. When one stops moving, it's a red dot that's stopped. That's the dot manual.
Four twenty in the morning. Rider 6612 finds rider 4471 two hundred meters from the Rangsit campus. On the asphalt, next to an overturned scooter. A black BMW stopped on the other side of the road. Rider 6612 calls an ambulance. Writes in the internal chat: "Ambulance on the way. BMW stopped. Student sitting on the curb. Rider is dead." Ploy reads it. Doesn't write anything. Sends the screenshot to Khun Anan.
Four fifty. Rider 4471 died on impact. Ploy hears the message. She drinks the cold tea that's been sitting on her desk for two hours. She keeps working her shift. More orders. More dots.
Six. End of shift. Ploy turns off her screen. She puts the work phone back in the dispatcher cabinet. The three buttons go back to being three buttons. She takes off her badge. She walks out the door that opens onto the courtyard where the riders park their scooters. She sees the morning shift's scooters, lined up, all the same, and 4471's is not among them. Spot 4471 is empty. The number, 4471, is written in chalk on the gray wall.
Nine o'clock. Khun Anan calls her into his office. The office is a three-by-three room, formica desk, ceiling fan. He tells her: "You bypassed procedure."
"Yes."
"You dispatched a rider without supervisory authorization."
"Yes."
"Three days suspension. No pay."
Ploy signs the suspension form. Writes below in her own hand: "I sent rider 6612 because rider 4471's dot had been stationary for eighteen minutes in front of the Rangsit campus and the manual does not explain what counts as a sign of an emergency."
Khun Anan reads the line. Says nothing. Puts the form in his drawer. Opens another drawer, takes out a cigarette, doesn't light it.
Ploy leaves. She takes the metro home at eleven. Her father is asleep. She lies down on her bed. She thinks about how the manual is seven pages long and how the red button always rings when you press it.
", "summary": "Ploy Thongsuk, twenty-nine years old, dispatcher four months into the job at the Foodpanda Sukhumvit dispatch center, third night shift of the week. Air-conditioned room, white fluorescent lights,…", "date_published": "2026-05-09T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/047/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/047/en", "title": "Everyday 047 — Karnoi", "content_html": "Mahmoud Suleiman has driven the NGO's white Land Cruiser since two thousand and fourteen. The convoy leaves El Fasher at eleven on the sixth of May. Four vehicles. Fifteen crates of water, eight of therapeutic nutrition, one small wooden crate marked UNICEF in black, holding ten refrigerated vials of insulin. Mahmoud is at the wheel of the first vehicle.
Before leaving Mahmoud checks the oil, the radiator water, the tyre pressure. He cleans the windscreen. He keeps the laissez-passer in a clear plastic sleeve in the inside pocket of his shirt. The Land Cruiser key has a yellow plastic keyring with a black print that reads SCUOLA GUIDA UM BARU — DAL 2018. Mahmoud had had the keyrings made for all his students. Three were left over. One is in his pocket.
Between El Fasher and Um Baru there are seven checkpoints. Mahmoud has been counting them for eleven years. Mellit. Tina. Mistarayy. Saraf Omra. Wadi Howar. Bir Maqsud. Karnoi. At Karnoi you turn right and enter Um Baru by the white track.
At Mellit Mahmoud lowers the window. Shows the laissez-passer. The RSF soldier, around thirty, waves him through. At Tina, the same. At Mistarayy the soldier is a young woman, thin. Her hands are shaking. She opens the water crate, takes out a bottle, puts it back. Waves him through. At Saraf Omra the laissez-passer is checked twice. At Wadi Howar there is a dog tied to a rope. At Bir Maqsud the soldier is asleep on his feet, leaning on his rifle. Mahmoud waits for him to wake, shows the paper. The soldier blinks, waves him through. Four hours have passed.
Karnoi, fourteen eighteen.
Mahmoud stops. Lowers the window.
The soldier at the seventh checkpoint is eighteen years old. He has a uniform with a belt too wide for him, black unbranded trainers, a Kalashnikov held low, and on his right ear a small cut on the cartilage.
Mahmoud looks at him.
Mahmoud recognises him.
He is the younger brother of Tariq Hammad. Tariq was sixteen in two thousand and eighteen, he had come to Mahmoud's driving school for five weeks. He always showed up with his little brother, ten years old, very thin, right ear with a small cut on the cartilage — he had fallen off a bicycle his father had built him from a metal frame found in Um Baru. The brother's name was Yousef.
Yousef is eighteen now.
Yousef holds the Kalashnikov low. He looks at Mahmoud. He looks at him whole. Mahmoud does not know what Yousef is looking at — the face of the driving instructor, the face of the driver, the face of a man from Um Baru, the face of a man alone. Mahmoud does not say his name. Mahmoud does not ask about Tariq. Mahmoud does not ask about the father, the mother, the house in Um Baru beneath the tamarind hill. Mahmoud asks nothing.
Yousef drops his gaze. Takes the laissez-passer. Looks at it. His hands hold the paper by the corners. His nails are short and dirty. Yousef hands the paper back. He says one word.
He says: "Pass."
Mahmoud nods. Raises the window. Shifts into first.
The convoy passes.
Mahmoud drives the white track. Eighteen kilometres of white track. The houses of Um Baru appear first — tin roofs, reed fences, the aerial of Fatima's primary school visible from a distance. He reaches the hospital at sixteen four. He unloads the crates. The nurse — her name is Hamida, she is forty-eight, two children — signs the form. She takes the UNICEF crate. Carries it inside. Counts ten vials.
Mahmoud goes back to the Land Cruiser. The sun is still high. He sits at the wheel. Holds the key in his hand. The keyring reads SCUOLA GUIDA UM BARU — DAL 2018. Mahmoud does not look at the keyring. Mahmoud puts the key in his pocket.
He gets out of the Land Cruiser. Walks toward home.
Fatima is at the door. She asks how the journey went. Mahmoud says it went well. Mahmoud says he delivered. Mahmoud says he leaves again tomorrow morning for El Fasher. Fatima hands him a cup of water. Mahmoud drinks.
Fatima asks about the checkpoints.
Mahmoud says: all routine.
Mahmoud does not say Yousef's name. Not to Fatima. Not to Hamida at the hospital, who is also from Um Baru and knew Tariq as a child. Mahmoud does not say it to anyone.
Mahmoud eats dinner. The moon rises early in May over Um Baru. Mahmoud sits on the metal chair in front of the door. Fatima is inside putting the children to bed. Mahmoud keeps the Land Cruiser key in his pocket.
He thinks of Yousef. Tariq Hammad is twenty-four today. Tariq Hammad's little brother let the UNICEF convoy through at Karnoi.
He does not know whether tomorrow Yousef will still be at Karnoi, or whether next week Tariq Hammad's brother will still be an RSF soldier, or a Sudanese army soldier, or dead.
Tomorrow morning at eleven Mahmoud leaves El Fasher again. Seven checkpoints. Mellit. Tina. Mistarayy. Saraf Omra. Wadi Howar. Bir Maqsud. Karnoi.
At Karnoi someone will check the laissez-passer. Mahmoud will pretend not to recognise.
", "summary": "Mahmoud Suleiman has driven the NGO's white Land Cruiser since two thousand and fourteen. The convoy leaves El Fasher at eleven on the sixth of May. Four vehicles. Fifteen crates of water, eight of…", "date_published": "2026-05-08T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/046/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/046/en", "title": "Everyday 046 — The sheep", "content_html": "Wadih counts the sheep at eleven forty. There are thirty-nine. There should be forty.
He counts them a second time. Thirty-nine.
The pasture lies southeast of Hasbaya, beneath the pine hill. The dry-stone wall runs east to west for four hundred meters. The sheep press against the wall in the cold months and against the woods in the warm months. May is warm. The sheep are at the edge of the pines.
Wadih is fifty-eight years old. He has grazed this same land since nineteen eighty-four. Wadih's father died in the year two thousand, seventy-six years old, at home. His mother three years later, seventy-three.
The missing sheep is called Maryam. Four years old. Three lambs. Wadih calls all the old females in the flock Maryam. Now he has three, three Maryams.
In the house, four hundred meters above the pasture, Wadih's daughter sleeps — Salwa, twenty-eight years old, married for six. Her husband Fares works at a mechanic's garage in Marjayoun, eight kilometers to the south. This morning at four Salwa telephoned Fares and told him not to come home. Fares said yes. Now Fares sleeps on the garage sofa.
Wadih knew the sheep might be missing. He had known since Monday. A four-year-old ewe with a newborn lamb separates from the flock for sounds the others do not hear. Wadih had said as much to Salwa in the afternoon, under the fig tree.
Wadih switches on his headlamp. The lamp is a white Petzl, bought in Beirut in twenty twenty-two, rechargeable batteries. He walks along the edge of the woods. He looks for tracks.
To the southwest the sky flashes. A silent flash, brief. Then a second. Then a third. Wadih counts the seconds between flash and sound. Nine, the first time. Eight, the second. Seven, the third.
The seconds grow shorter.
Wadih knows what a closing distance means. These are not storms. It has not rained for twenty days. These are artillery strikes coming from the Marjayoun area to the south, or from further down, from the border. The village radio had said that afternoon: six hundred and nineteen strikes yesterday. Wadih does not know what six hundred and nineteen means. He knows what nine seconds means.
Wadih walks on. Four hundred meters. He stops. He points the lamp between the pines.
There is an animal standing still behind a low rosemary bush. The lamplight touches its flank. Wadih recognizes the white back and the black patch behind the ear.
Maryam.
Wadih approaches. The sheep does not move. Wadih crouches. He places his hand on her flank. Warm.
Maryam is breathing. Slowly, but she is breathing.
Wadih sweeps the lamp around. The light picks out two things: a dark stain on the ground near the right hind leg, and a grey metal object, finger-length, driven into the earth a meter away. The object has a curved tab along one side.
Wadih recognizes the shape. A submunition from a cluster bomb. He had found one in two thousand and six, after the other war, when the pasture was full of them. It had been unexploded. That time he had called a man from UNIFIL.
There is no UNIFIL in the fields of Hasbaya at eleven fifty on the fifth of May.
Wadih looks at Maryam's leg. The dark stain is blood. The sheep has a wound six centimeters long on the muscle of the thigh. The submunition detonated partially. Maryam is alive by chance.
Wadih does two things, in order.
First he removes the cotton scarf he wears around his neck. He folds it in four. He presses it against Maryam's wound, holding it with his left hand. The sheep trembles.
Then he lifts Maryam. Forty kilograms, live weight. He loads her onto his right shoulder. Wadih has the knees of a fifty-eight-year-old man who has grazed land for forty-two years. Wadih walks back toward the dry-stone wall. Four hundred meters.
He does not look at the sky again. He walks and that is all.
To the southwest the flashes continue. Six seconds. Five seconds. Five seconds again.
Wadih reaches the dry-stone wall at four minutes past midnight. The other sheep stand still against the woods, gathered together. Wadih sets Maryam down on a blue plastic sheet he keeps folded in a niche in the wall.
He washes the wound with water from a one-and-a-half-liter plastic bottle. He disinfects with iodine. He ties the scarf around the thigh.
Maryam opens her right eye in the light of the dry-stone wall. She closes it. She opens it again.
Wadih sits back against the wall. The blue sheet is under the sheep, the other sheep are behind the wall, the grass is still, the moon is high to the right, the sky to the southwest now makes a fourth flash that Wadih no longer counts.
In the house above the pasture, Salwa switches on the hallway lamp. She steps out onto the balcony. She sees the light of her father's headlamp, motionless, down below, beside the dry-stone wall. The lamp does not move. Salwa goes back inside. She switches off the hallway lamp. She stays on the living room sofa with her phone in her hand.
Maryam breathes. Wadih counts the breaths. One every two and a half seconds.
Dawn in Hasbaya, in May, comes at five twelve. Five hours and eight minutes remain.
Wadih stays seated. The sheep breathes. The scarf holds. The submunition, in the pasture four hundred meters away, is still where it was.
Maryam opens her right eye. She closes it.
", "summary": "Wadih counts the sheep at eleven forty. There are thirty-nine. There should be forty. He counts them a second time. Thirty-nine. The pasture lies southeast of Hasbaya, beneath the pine hill. The…", "date_published": "2026-05-07T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/045/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/045/en", "title": "Everyday 045 — The note on the fridge", "content_html": "At eleven fifty, Liudmyla puts the water for tea in a pot she had cleaned with lemon back in March, because Ivan, in a three-minute phone call from the front, had told her that limescale in pots was one of those things nobody at home knew how to deal with, and that he, in the trenches, had learned to deal with it using lemon, and Liudmyla, after hanging up, had gone to the pantry and taken the lemon she kept for tea and cut it in half and cleaned all three pots, one after the other, while Saltivka down below emptied out for yet another alarm; tonight the pot is still clean, and the water boils the way it did before the phone calls, before the war, before Ivan. The radio says the ceasefire begins at midnight. Liudmyla turns it off.
She sits at the kitchen table. In front of her: the landline. It is a red Vef from 1989, her mother's, which had sat unplugged for twenty-two years in the pantry, behind the good tablecloth, and which she had put back into service in March, after Ivan, in another of those brief calls that were now her life, had told her that in Saltivka the Russian jamming wiped out the mobile signal for hours at a time and that the landline, even if old, always got through; the technician had come on a Saturday morning, a Belarusian man of thirty who had asked no questions, had looked at the copper wire, had cleaned a connection, had said the line was still there, and had left without asking for payment, saying only that it rang now, and indeed it had rung, once, on the first of April, and it had been a teleshopping call from Minsk. On the fridge, held up by an apple-shaped magnet, there is the slip of paper with Ivan's mobile number. She knows it by heart. She has read it two thousand times. Tonight she reads it the way one reads prayers, not to remember it, but to have it in front of her.
At midnight and zero seconds she dials the number.
It rings. It rings. It rings. Liudmyla looks at her hand on the table. It is still. Her hand does not shake. A month ago, when the commanding officer had called to tell her Ivan had been moved to a position near Kupiansk, her hand had shaken. Tonight, no. Tonight it is her mother's hand, the hands her mother would lay on the table before speaking of things that were not to be said. It rings. It rings. On the fifth ring, someone answers.
"Yes?"
It is a woman's voice, young, saying "yes" in Russian, not in Ukrainian. Liudmyla, for one second, one second only, thinks she must have dialled wrong. Then she understands she hasn't — it is someone from the front, a comrade who speaks Russian like half of Saltivka. The voice is young, around twenty, not drowsy, not frightened, simply a voice answering the telephone. Liudmyla has not prepared what to say if someone else answered, because Liudmyla for three weeks had not called at all. Not out of indifference. She had understood in mid-April, one morning like any other while she was ironing a shirt that belonged to no one, that she wanted to know without being able to call, that she wanted the privilege of being the one who holds back, not the one who receives the call. Tonight she called, and now she says nothing.
She hangs up. The 1989 Vef has a weight Liudmyla had forgotten; the receiver returns to the cradle with the thud of something that has mass, and Liudmyla stays with her palm open on the receiver, the way one stays with an open palm on a forehead that is no longer warm.
The telephone rings.
It rings loud, because the 1989 Vef has a mechanical bell, metal striking metal, a ring that Saltivka had not heard in decades and which now, in the first minute of the ceasefire, fills the kitchen like a toll of a bell. Liudmyla picks up on the first ring. She says "yes" with no breath behind it.
"Mama, it was Sasha. She had the phone just then. She saw an unknown number, thought it might be the commanding officer, and answered. Sorry."
Liudmyla does not speak. She hears Ivan's breath, and beneath Ivan's breath the rustle of something that could be wind, or a drone, or nothing. Ivan says "Ma?" She does not speak. She thinks that since he had told her about the lemon they had not spoken again about things so small. She thinks that the ceasefire was not for him, it was for her, to give her three minutes of line, and now that she has them she does not know what to do with them. Ivan says "Ma, are you there?" She tightens her grip on the receiver.
Through the kitchen window, on the sixth floor, to the east — from the east everything comes — there is nothing to see. The city is dark. Ivan breathes. Liudmyla does not speak. She stays with the 1989 Vef pressed against her ear. She stays. She stays.
"Ma, are you there?"
Liudmyla looks at the slip of paper on the fridge. She reads it for the two-thousand-and-first time.
", "summary": "At eleven fifty, Liudmyla puts the water for tea in a pot she had cleaned with lemon back in March, because Ivan, in a three-minute phone call from the front, had told her that limescale in pots was…", "date_published": "2026-05-06T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/044/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/044/en", "title": "Everyday 044 — Sesto San Giovanni, zero forty-three", "content_html": "It was eleven fifty-two when the train stopped at Sesto San Giovanni. The loudspeaker said technical fault, and ten minutes later it said it again, and after twenty minutes nothing more. I was sitting by the window, across from me a woman dressed in black, beside me two Indian girls talking quietly about an exam. I had finished my shift at eleven at piazzale Loreto, eleven years of signing forms at the municipal burial service. Four stops from home.
I had already mapped out the sequence. Two minutes to take off my stockings, eight for the shower, ten to put on my cream, twelve to get into bed, alarm at six fifteen. I open my phone. I close it. I open my phone. I close it. The woman across from me wipes her nose with a white handkerchief, as though she has been crying not long before. I look out, on platform three nothing is moving anymore, and the station's illuminated board says MILANO CENTRALE in orange, and the orange does not change.
After half an hour the driver speaks again. «Person on the tracks». Person. The word suspended, set down on top of the carriage the way you set something on a shelf. Nobody breathes. One of the Indian girls closes her notebook and says something in her language that I don't understand but think I can guess. The woman in black takes another handkerchief from her bag and starts again.
I pull from my coat pocket a bag of mint sweets left over from the afternoon and offer them. She takes one. She says thank you, and then she says «you're young». I am not young. I am forty. I don't say so.
The reflection of my face in the glass still catches me off guard. I look younger than I thought I was, and I realize I don't quite know how young I thought I was. I hadn't looked at my face this way in a stretch of time I couldn't put a date to.
I think about Marco, my husband, who at this hour is sleeping face down with his hand under the pillow, and I think he has never noticed whether I come home at eleven thirty or at twenty past one. I think about Adelina, the basil plant on the balcony that I started calling by a name because I have no children and never wanted any. I think about my department head, Riccardo, who told me two weeks ago «you sign more than anyone, signora, have you thought about a promotion?» and I said fine, and then never put in the request. Riccardo's words come back to me as though he spoke them five minutes ago. I think that perhaps this is the first time in eleven years that what he said has actually reached me.
My sister Stefania comes back to me too, who lives in Como and who calls on Thursdays at eight in the evening. Tonight is Friday. Stefania does not call on Fridays. My father died in July 2017 and I always picture him with my mother three steps behind, and when I phone her she always asks whether I've eaten, and I always say yes even when I haven't eaten, and she says good. The rain starts, lightly. The Indian girls close their notebook. One of them says something that I have the sense means we've arrived, but we haven't arrived. We are still.
At twelve forty-three I lift my finger from the clock on my phone. I don't look at it again. I stay still. I don't write to anyone. I don't call. I don't send the message already typed, «train stopped, technical problem, running late», which had been sitting in drafts for twenty minutes. I don't send it.
I allowed myself, without saying so to myself, not to account for the time. I hadn't done it since university. Perhaps I had never done it. My nights have always had a direction, even the empty ones. Not tonight. Tonight the carriage is still, outside the rain starts lightly, inside there are seven of us sitting and looking at each other without quite looking, and no one is waiting for us except sleep, and sleep is waiting for all of us.
At one fifty-four the train moves again. The woman in black hands me back the bag of sweets, full, she has not taken a single one after the first. I take it back. She looks out, I look at her, we smile inside the same silence. We say nothing. The Indian girls got off at Greco-Pirelli, they waved with their palms open against the window, one of them left a pencil on the small table.
I reach Greco-Pirelli at one fifty-seven. Centrale at one fifty-nine. The underground has been stopped for an hour. I take a taxi. I get home at two twenty-eight. Marco didn't notice.
I take a longer shower than usual. I turn on the water and listen to its sound. I think that the boy on the tracks had a name I will read in the papers tomorrow, and that no one said who he was, and that the seven of us in the carriage spent three hours inside his death without knowing it.
I look at the bathroom clock. It is a round white clock with black numbers. For the first time I don't read it. I see the hands. I don't read the time. I take off my towel. I go to bed.
", "summary": "It was eleven fifty-two when the train stopped at Sesto San Giovanni. The loudspeaker said technical fault, and ten minutes later it said it again, and after twenty minutes nothing more. I was…", "date_published": "2026-05-05T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/043/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/043/en", "title": "Everyday 043 — Antioch", "content_html": "Goma, Hotel Karibu Bay, night between the third and fourth of May, two ten in the morning. Landing of the Beechcraft with lights off on the private runway of Goma International, operated that week by Heritage East, registered in the Emirates. Eight men get off. He is the fourth. His name, on the receipt he will sign twenty minutes from now, is Andres Pacheco Restrepo. Thirty-four years old. Former sergeant in the Colombian army, discharged in 2019, two tours in Yemen as a contractor for a Dubai firm with legal headquarters in Cyprus, six months in Kabul, four in Khartoum. Landing in Goma for the first time in his life.
The handler is a South African with grey hair and a set to his mouth that comes from speaking Portuguese in Maputo. His name is Rian. He never asks to be called Rian. Andres will call him Rian because he hears the others do it.
Room at the entrance of the Karibu Bay, two halogen lamps, a table of varnished open-grain wood, a metal box the size of a microwave, already half full of passports. The handler calls them one by one. Pacheco. Lozano. Restrepo. Vargas. Four Colombians. Then the three Peruvians and the Venezuelan. Pacheco is the fourth to be called, the first to step up to the table.
He approaches. Rucksack on his right shoulder, passport in the inner pocket of his jacket, an unused Sudanese visa on page seventeen, a Yemeni visa on fourteen, an Afghan entry stamp on six. The handler opens the passport. He stops at fourteen. He does not comment. Pacheco notices.
"Which province of Colombia, Pacheco?"
"Antioquia."
That is not true. Andres Pacheco Restrepo was born in Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca, Pacific coast, a city in which in no year of any decade has any recruitment agency met a volunteer without first asking itself who he is running from. Antioquia is the answer he always gives, because Antioquia is the answer the handler wants to hear. Antioquia is Medellín, Antioquia is the province with the highest number of former military in private recruitment post-2002, Antioquia is the narrative filter.
The handler writes "Antioquia" on the A4 sheet in front of him. Andres watches him write it. The handler's pen is a fountain pen with a black nib, and it makes a very small dry sound with each letter. Andres counts seven letters, counts the dot of the i, counts the sound when the nib leaves the paper.
Now, the gesture.
Andres holds out the passport. He holds it out back-first, not palm-first. A minimal variation, a turn of the wrist, nothing a border officer would notice, but the handler is not a border officer, and he raises his eyes. For one second. Pacheco does not pull back. He leaves his hand there, back exposed, and the handler takes the passport from his fingers with his own right hand, and Pacheco feels his hand go empty.
In the moment his hand goes empty, he understands.
He understands that every time he handed over his passport in another country he had already been someone else. In Sana'a he had been Pacheco-not-Colombian. In Kabul he had been Pacheco-veteran. In Khartoum he had been Pacheco-good-soldier. Each country a small administrative death, each stamp a trace of someone he was no longer by the time the page was stamped. This time he knows it as it happens. Goma will be page eighteen. Pacheco-Antioquia. Another Pacheco.
He thinks of Buenaventura. The first thing that comes to him is the rain of March, that kind of rain that arrives in three minutes and empties the streets of the barrio Independencia, where his mother still works at sixty-two in a hair salon and where his younger brother, Andrés like him but called Mauricio in the family to avoid confusion, died at fourteen in 2010 in a gang fight. He thinks that his mother, if she called him now, would know he was in Africa from the country code, and would tell him as she does every time cuídate. He thinks that cuídate, when it comes down to it, is the word you say to someone who is already handing over the passport.
The handler puts the passport in the box.
Pacheco signs a receipt. Black Bic pen, pre-printed Heritage East form, amount to be settled at the end of the mission. Four thousand dollars. Bank transfer to a Bogotá account by the fifteenth of the following month. Below the signature line, a clause in English in six-point type: "the undersigned declares that he is providing services as a technical consultant in a special operations zone," a formula he has already read ten times and signed ten times without translating.
He leaves the room.
On the tarmac of the courtyard, the runway lights are off, the hotel lamps are on. Half yellow light, half blue light. The air is warm with the lake. The lake is there, behind the perimeter wall, felt more than seen. Pacheco makes the sign of the cross. Thumb on his forehead, thumb on his chest, on his left shoulder, on his right. He does it every time he lands, he does it every time he hands things over.
He lights a cigarette.
He thinks that Antioquia, he has never been there.
", "summary": "Goma, Hotel Karibu Bay, night between the third and fourth of May, two ten in the morning. Landing of the Beechcraft with lights off on the private runway of Goma International, operated that week by…", "date_published": "2026-05-04T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/042/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/042/en", "title": "Everyday 042 — The Foot in the Door", "content_html": "The door that separates sewing department A from sewing department B in director Pham's factory, Bình Tân district, Ho Chi Minh City, is a double-leaf door of light grey metal with the placard P-12B. It was installed, Hà Thị Linh told me later in the courtyard during the lunch break, in March of two thousand and nineteen, by the maintenance worker Quân, now seventy-three, who calibrated its return spring to three and a half seconds on the back of a shoe delivery slip.
Department A has had air conditioning since March. Department B has six ceiling fans. The difference, at nine in the morning, is seven degrees. The difference, at fourteen hundred, is nine degrees. The difference, Linh told me, is the reason why last week Một, fifty-two, row five, fainted between row three and row four and fell on the cement floor. Pham did not file a report. Hương brought her back to the machine after twelve minutes.
Linh is thirty-one, has been at the factory for four years, row four machine seven. Every month she sends two million four hundred thousand dong to her family. One million nine hundred thousand for her brother's tuition, twenty-one, second-year electrical engineering at the University of Cần Thơ. Five hundred thousand to her mother, sixty-eight, in Bến Tre, for blood pressure medicine.
This morning at five forty-six, before the start of the shift, director Pham stopped maintenance worker Quân in the courtyard and told him that tomorrow, Saturday, he had to come check the spring of door P-12B because the wear, Pham said, was anomalous. Quân said yes. Pham left. Quân, Linh told me, looked toward department B for a moment and then kept walking toward the workshop.
At six fourteen, during the first bobbin change of the day, Linh opens door P-12B. She opens it all the way. The flow of cold air from department A enters department B with a low sound. Then, hearing Hương's steps in the central corridor, Linh returns the door to an opening of about thirty centimetres and rests it with her right foot on the metal threshold. The sandal, black rubber size thirty-six, sole worn under the big toe, rests half inside the threshold and half outside.
From that moment on, every twenty-two minutes or so, Hương walks through the corridor. The door stays at thirty centimetres. Linh's foot does not move.
Bích Trâm, twenty-three, row four machine eight, moves her Juki forty centimetres toward the door. Một, the one who had fallen last week, moves hers thirty. Hà, thirty-seven, row two, brings a towel from the coffee break and lays it on the floor where the oil from the machine nearest the door drips, because oil on cold air turns slippery and today, Linh told me, no one must fall.
At nine twenty-four, the analogue thermometer reads thirty-two degrees in the half of the department near door P-12B. Thirty-seven degrees in the far half. The difference, Linh told me, is five degrees, and five degrees is the difference between a shirt sewn well and a shirt sewn as best one can.
At ten eleven, the Juki on row three machine two breaks down. The pinion of the presser foot jumps two teeth. The worker at that station, Diệu, twenty-eight, walks through door P-12B to ask supervisor Khánh in department A for a replacement presser foot. There is no presser foot in A. Khánh calls maintenance worker Quân by radio. Quân answers from the workshop and says to wait eight minutes.
For the next forty minutes door P-12B stays completely open. Linh does not move her foot. Quân crosses twice, on the way out toward the storeroom of department B to fetch the pinion, on the way back toward department A with the presser foot. The second time, leaving, he rests his right hand on the stainless steel handle for a moment. The handle, Linh told me later in the courtyard, at ten fifty-one is cold. The flow of air from department A has hit it for forty minutes.
At ten fifty-one, Diệu starts the Juki up again. The door goes back to thirty centimetres. Linh's foot goes back onto the threshold.
Hương had not been through department B since nine forty-six. At eleven thirty-eight, Hương stops in front of door P-12B. Linh is sewing the hem of a white short-sleeved shirt, size M, batch 04-26-3. The machine hums. The thermometer behind machine seven reads thirty-three point two. Linh's shirt is wet under her arms and along her spine. Her right foot has been on the metal threshold for five hours and twenty-four minutes. The sandal has left a half-circle of damp on the rubber gasket of the door.
Linh does not move her foot.
Three seconds. Hương looks at the foot. Hương looks at Linh. Linh does not meet her gaze, she sews. Hương says one single thing, in a low voice, and says «two thousand and thirteen, twenty-two». Then Hương turns and resumes her round.
Linh knows what it means. Twenty-two was the number of workers in department B in two thousand and thirteen, when Hương herself entered the factory as a worker, row three, machine ten. Twenty-two, Linh told me later in the courtyard, is the number of women who had to sign the renunciation of the three additional summer breaks in order to obtain the ceiling fans, the six fans that today turn above Linh's head and are not enough. Hương signed first.
At twelve oh three, director Pham comes in from the central corridor with the radio in his hand. The radio is broadcasting on speaker a male voice in American English, southern accent, that says a figure and then says «final order, no further movement», and then a pause, and then «we'll see in two weeks». Pham stops in front of door P-12B. Pham looks at the open door. Pham looks at Linh's foot. Pham looks at Linh. Linh sews. Pham does not call Hương. Pham lowers the radio and turns toward department A. The American voice says something else. Pham leaves.
The door stays open.
Eighteen hundred. The end-of-shift siren sounds. Linh moves her foot. The door closes in three and a half seconds, the way Quân had calibrated it in March of two thousand and nineteen. Linh bends over the metal threshold to refasten the buckle of her right sandal, which the pressure of the shift has loosened. The buckle gives a small brass click. Linh straightens up.
Linh leaves with the other workers of department B toward the courtyard. The cold air, Linh told me, stays in department B for about ten minutes after the door closes. Then no more. Tomorrow maintenance worker Quân, who is seventy-three and has a tiny handwriting on the back of shoe delivery slips, comes to check the spring. Linh doesn't know, she told me, whether Quân will write a second calculation on the back of the slip, or whether he will fold the slip back into the file without adding anything. Quân has been Hương's friend since two thousand and nineteen. Quân has been Pham's employee since two thousand and ten.
Linh rides home on her motorbike. Her room is in alley forty-eight of Bình Long street, twenty-two minutes from the factory. At four in the morning, a motorbike enters the alley and stops two doors further on. It is the neighbour, Châu, coming back from the night shift at the Pou Yuen shoe factory. Châu kills the engine. Linh hears the key turn in the lock.
", "summary": "The door that separates sewing department A from sewing department B in director Pham's factory, Bình Tân district, Ho Chi Minh City, is a double-leaf door of light grey metal with the placard P-12B.…", "date_published": "2026-05-03T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/041/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/041/en", "title": "Everyday 041 — Three Blue Dots", "content_html": "That night I was answering Daniel Vermeulen, father of three in Johannesburg, and Daniel had just written "you swear it's not a scam?", and I was writing the answer they had taught me on the first day, the answer that said "of course, the wallet verifications were already done this morning by the legal team, the documentation will reach you by email by 18:00 Johannesburg time, sincerely Sara".
It was two-fourteen at night and there were five other workstations in the room and three Romanians were sleeping on mats in a corner because it was their break shift, and I was drinking a Yakult that had been sitting there for eight hours warm, and the room stank of hot plastic and of the fried food Yi-jin had brought up from the seventh floor at nine in the evening, and Yi-jin was the shift boss and she was twenty-nine and she was from Henan province and spoke a northern Mandarin that always sounded shrill to me, and Mandarin I had learned on the job, because in Vietnam I spoke only Vietnamese and school French and tourist English, and Mandarin had been taught to me in three months by a woman from Phnom Penh whose name was Mai and whom I had not seen since.
I had arrived in that building ten months earlier. I was twenty-six years old. My father was a bricklayer in Bắc Giang. My mother sewed shirts at home. I had studied two years of administration in Hà Nội and then I had stopped because there was no money. I had found the Telegram post that was looking for girls for a "customer service in Cambodia" with "lodging included and a thousand dollars a month", and I had thought that a thousand dollars a month in Cambodia was two months of my father's salary, and I had said yes.
The trip had been Hà Nội-Phnom Penh-Manila and in Manila someone took my passport, and I said "excuse me" in English and they answered "zhànghào", which was the account number, and in that moment I understood that I had signed something that was not what I thought, and they took me by car to Angeles City and they made me go up to the sixth floor of the building, and they told me that my travel debt was five thousand dollars and that I would pay it back by working, and I said yes, because saying no in that room was not an option I had ever considered.
The fifth floor had bars welded to the windows. The sixth did not. In February a Vietnamese coworker from Hải Phòng had thrown herself from the sixth floor. Her name was Trang. She was twenty-two. The management had kept the sixth-floor windows shut for two weeks and then opened them again because the heat was unbreathable, and no one threw themselves anymore, because no one was new enough not to know what it meant to throw oneself from the sixth floor.
Daniel Vermeulen was forty-seven and had three children. He was on early retirement from a logistics company at the port of Durban. He had sold his grandmother's house two weeks earlier, he had told me, because he was moving into a smaller one, and with the difference he now had forty-eight thousand dollars more in his account, and he wanted to put them into an investment that returned eight per cent a month. Eight per cent a month was a figure no bank in the world offered, and I knew it, and Daniel maybe knew it too but did not want to know it.
I had written the answer. It said "of course, you can trust at one hundred per cent", and then the whole thing about the wallet and the legal team and the documentation, and my finger was on the SEND button, and in that moment I heard the steps in the corridor and Yi-jin shouting in northern Mandarin "BI! BI!", and then the first blow on the armored door of the floor.
I counted. I had eleven seconds before the door gave way, maybe. I deleted the entire message I had written. The text bar was empty. I wrote a single word. Run. I pressed SEND.
Then I did something they had told me on the first day never to do. I took a screenshot of the conversation. I opened it in the gallery. I wrote to Daniel, from my Sara account, I wrote: "I did not send. I am Linh, I am twenty-seven, tell the Vietnamese consulate in Manila I am on the sixth floor of the Diosdado building, Angeles City, Pampanga". I pressed SEND.
The door gave way on the third blow. The Romanians hid under the counter. Yi-jin disappeared through the back door. I did not hide. I put the phone on the counter with the screen facing up. The handcuffs were plastic, lavender-colored. They read me my rights in English and in Tagalog, a BI woman with a bulletproof vest two sizes too big, and then they asked me what my name was, and I said Lê Thị Linh, and the woman nodded, and wrote my name on a sheet.
When I came out of the room, the phone was still on the counter. The screen showed Daniel's conversation. The three blue dots of his reply were pulsing at the bottom of the chat. They pulsed. They pulsed. Then they pulsed no longer.
", "summary": "That night I was answering Daniel Vermeulen, father of three in Johannesburg, and Daniel had just written \"you swear it's not a scam?\", and I was writing the answer they had taught me on the first…", "date_published": "2026-05-02T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/040/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/040/en", "title": "Everyday 040 — Bologna Evening", "content_html": "Aurora had read the newspaper at the bar on via Saragozza at twelve ten on the twenty-ninth of April. She was standing at the counter with the coffee going cold in front of her. The front-page headline: nine hundred and thirty-four million for labor. Below, in two columns: hiring incentives, fair wage, crackdown on digital labor brokerage.
She read the first column. Four hundred and ninety-seven and a half million for the hiring of young people. Bonuses for women up to eight hundred euros a month in the South. Bonuses for the unemployed over thirty-five. Tax breaks for companies that apply the fair wage set by collective bargaining.
She read the second column. Crackdown on digital labor brokerage. The platforms had to verify the identity of whoever made deliveries. Forbidden to hand over one's account. Sanctions on companies, suspension of activity for failure to oversee.
She looked for her category in the numbers. The numbers were in the first column. The second column had rules.
She paid for the coffee. She went back to deliveries.
Eight packages in the afternoon. Twelve in the evening. Roast chicken, sushi, a case of water for a lady on Sant'Orsola. All regular. All on the platform. All clean.
The chat, though, no. The chat was something else. The chat was the reason Aurora had a fixed package of deliveries on Saturday and Sunday, the golden hours, the ones that made the difference between three hundred and eighty euros a month and six hundred and twenty. The package came from Tarek. Tarek was a name.
Aurora got home at eleven forty-seven. Via San Vitale was empty. The bar shutters were down. The electric bike was completely dead. The display read thirty per cent, but the motor hadn't been pushing since the Pratello.
She went up the three flights with the bike on her shoulder, as she had for eight months. She opened the door. She leaned the bike against the magazine rack in the corridor. The bike stood lopsided, the handlebar against the wall. She didn't turn on the main light: only the kitchen one.
The phone vibrated in her pocket. She already knew. She had known since midday.
She took the phone out of her pocket. The "Bologna Sera" chat had one hundred and four members. The group photos were unrecognizable faces, Arabic writing, emojis, a Senegal flag, a stylized bicycle. The numbers were saved with codes: T-1, M-2, A-3. Aurora was B-17. No one knew her by name. Tarek had once written "ciao bella" and then never again, because he had understood she answered badly.
Tarek was a name they passed around. Not a person. A protocol. In two years of Bologna Sera, Tarek had written at different times, in different styles, with different typos. Aurora had always suspected. That night she knew.
Aurora's phone was a Samsung A14 with the glass cracked on the upper right corner. The peeling sticker on the back was from the pizzeria on via Mascarella that closed at two in the morning and where Aurora sometimes stopped to eat a slice of margherita before going home. The sticker showed a pizza with two eyes and a mouth. The eyes were two olives. The mouth was a crooked line. The sticker was losing its corner.
Aurora opened the chat settings. She selected delete. She confirmed. The chat disappeared. She went to contacts. She searched T-1. She opened it. Blocked. Deleted.
Her hands were trembling. They weren't trembling from fear. They were trembling from the round at the Pratello, from the climb up via Saragozza, from the case of water for the lady on Sant'Orsola that weighed eleven kilos.
She was about to turn off the phone when the message arrived. Number with no name. Three dots. Then: "Aurora, you deleted. I saw."
The three dots started again. They stopped. They started again. They stopped. Aurora watched them for twelve seconds. Then she put the phone on the table, face down.
She took off her jacket. She hung it on the kitchen handle. She went to the bathroom. She washed her hands with the Marseille soap her mother had sent from Lecce. She dried herself. She came back to the kitchen.
The three dots were gone. The message was still there.
Aurora opened the chat with the new number. She wrote: I don't work for you anymore.
She sent.
She blocked the number. She deleted the chat. She turned off the phone.
She stayed in the kitchen with the yellow Formica table in front of her, the chair broken on the left side, the charger dangling from the socket, and she understood something the nuns in middle school called knowing what one does not know. She didn't know whether Tarek (or Tarek's Tarek) had really understood. She knew that she had understood. She had understood that the decree was a thing that got signed.
She ate a piece of stale bread with oil. She drank tap water. She had taken out the filter pitcher in March because the filter cost nine euros and lasted a month.
The next morning she turned on the phone at six twenty. No messages. She went down the stairs. The bike was still at zero charge. She carried it on her shoulder to the charging station at Porta Mazzini. She waited for the display to climb to sixty. Then she took the first package of the morning, from a different platform, one with a contract, one that paid five euros a delivery less than the one before.
It was the first day of the decree. Nine hundred and thirty-four million euros in Rome. Nothing for Aurora. For Aurora there were rules. The rules paid five euros a delivery less.
", "summary": "Aurora had read the newspaper at the bar on via Saragozza at twelve ten on the twenty-ninth of April. She was standing at the counter with the coffee going cold in front of her. The front-page…", "date_published": "2026-05-01T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/039/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/039/en", "title": "Everyday 039 — The one minute and forty-seven second voice message", "content_html": "The burial of Ali Ayyoub, a rescuer of the Lebanese Civil Defense killed on the evening of April twenty-eighth at Majdal Zoun during the second of the two strikes the Israelis had dropped on the same building eighteen minutes apart from each other, took place the following day at the Islamic cemetery of Tyre, eastern sector, at six in the evening, with the sun still high over the sea and the sand that had warmed during the day and that in the evening retains heat better than concrete and that for this reason (Hassan, Ali's younger brother, told me later) is called in his family "the rest of the earth," an expression that the mother of Ali and Hassan, Souad, had always used also for other things that cooled slowly, like bread just out of the oven or the hands of a relative who had recently stopped working in the fields.
Hassan, thirty-one years old, an employee of the land registry of Tyre, the second of three sons, had come to the cemetery in the gray Toyota Corolla of two thousand seven that had belonged to his father Jamil before being his, a car that everyone in Tyre recognized by the scratch on the right fender and by the cassette holder still mounted on the dashboard, because Jamil had died in two thousand twenty-two and Hassan had not wanted to change anything; and Hassan had arrived at the cemetery forty minutes ahead of the ceremony, and had parked outside the gate beneath the fig tree of the Daher family, a family of which Hassan no longer knew anyone but whom the fig tree knew, because he had eaten its fresh figs in July for fifteen years in a row going to the cemetery to visit grandfather Khaled and then aunt Rania and then two cousins.
The ceremony was brief. The imam of Majdal Zoun, who had also arrived recently because Majdal Zoun is forty minutes by car from Tyre and because the imam of Majdal Zoun had held another funeral at three in the afternoon for one of the two civilians killed in the first of the two raids, read the fatiha. Karim Ayyoub, older brother of Ali and Hassan, father of Mahmoud who is four years old, threw the first handful of earth. The second was Hassan's. The third was Souad's, the mother, who at seventy-two truly bent down at the edge of the grave and poured the earth from her right hand without leaning on her left hand, and this, Hassan told me later, was the moment in which he understood that his mother had decided that Ali would be the last son she would bury.
At ten in the evening Hassan and Karim and Souad were at Karim's house, where Karim's wife Rana had prepared rice with chicken for the guests who were a score, and Mahmoud, who is four, had been sleeping in the children's room since nine forty, and Hassan, who at Karim's house had never felt at ease even before all this because Karim's house was full of the sounds of children and Hassan at thirty-one had none, sat on the living-room sofa and listened to Souad speak with a neighbor of practical things, of who would bring couscous the next day, of who would collect the death certificate at the municipal office, of who would speak with the Civil Defense for the paperwork.
At eleven forty Hassan told his mother he had to go home, and the mother said go. Hassan went out. He went to the Toyota Corolla parked beneath the fig tree (the fig tree was still the same, even at night, even with the moon that at the end of April in Tyre was nearly full). He shut himself inside. He turned the phone volume to maximum. He put the phone on the dashboard. He opened WhatsApp. He went to Ali's chat. The last message was a voice memo of one minute and forty-seven seconds sent on April twenty-eighth at nine eighteen in the evening, eighteen minutes before the second strike, which Hassan had not listened to because at nine eighteen he had been standing in front of the refrigerator getting a bottle of water and because at nine twenty-two Karim's call had reached him saying Ali is at Majdal Zoun, there's been a strike, he's going in, and Hassan had put the phone in his trouser pocket without opening the voice memo.
He pressed play.
Ali's voice was Ali's voice, a voice calm and lightly hoarse from smoking (Ali had been smoking for fifteen years and was hiding it from his mother with the same scrupulousness with which a boy hides cigarettes in a drawer), and Ali was saying: "Hassan, I'm at Majdal Zoun, the building on street eight, the first strike was ten minutes ago, there are three people still inside, including a child, they told me he's Mahmoud's age, he's four, his name is Mahmoud too, he's curious, we're going in with the Bilal and Ahmad team, you know that here today they know, and you know what we know here" (he used "you know what we know here" for the double tap, because at the Civil Defense they called it that, "what we know here," and eighty per cent of the operators knew it and went in anyway). And then a long silence, inside which one could hear the sounds of the street and Ali's breathing which was shorter. Then Ali whispered: "if I don't come back tell Souad I ate the rice she made me Tuesday." A sound of metal was heard, perhaps a door. The voice memo ended.
Hassan kept the phone on the dashboard. He stayed seated with his hands on the steering wheel and listened to the silence after. He took the phone off the dashboard. He turned it off. He started the car. He went back to Karim's house. Mahmoud was still sleeping in the children's room.
", "summary": "The burial of Ali Ayyoub, a rescuer of the Lebanese Civil Defense killed on the evening of April twenty-eighth at Majdal Zoun during the second of the two strikes the Israelis had dropped on the same…", "date_published": "2026-04-30T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/038/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/038/en", "title": "Everyday 038 — Tightening the belt", "content_html": "I know that boy. His name is Idrissa Sawadogo, he is twenty-three years old, he comes from the village of Kongo twenty kilometers from Djibo, his mother grows sorghum on seven small fields at the edge of the track that goes to Mali. They took him in January of two thousand and twenty-four, one morning, with six others from the village. They had said it was volunteer service. They had made them sign. Idrissa had put his cross, because he could not write.
The checkpoint where I find him is twenty-two kilometers from Djibo, on the red track that cuts through the savanna of the Soum. A patch of beaten earth, a punctured sheet-metal drum that stands as sentry, a mahogany bench where the three older VDPs sit spitting watermelon seeds. Volontaires pour la Défense de la Patrie, that is what they call them. Idrissa is one of them. Idrissa stands beside the drum, the rifle slung across, the sling adjusted for someone else, because for Idrissa the rifle hangs below his belt and beats against his thigh when he walks. It is the fourth shift of the week. It is Tuesday.
On the radio you can hear the commander speaking from Bobo-Dioulasso. He speaks in fits, the device is old, the dying battery dies faster than usual and no one has the car to drive to Djibo to buy others. The commander asks who is on duty. Sory, the sergeant, replies "Idrissa Sawadogo, Boukary Ouedraogo, Mahamadou Tall, and me." The commander says something that cannot be heard. Sory repeats "received."
A woman passes with a cart. Thirty-five years old, peulh, dressed in indigo blue. On the cart two children. The little one, two years old, is holding his face with his hands. The older one, seven years old, is holding the little one by the shirt. The woman stops in front of the checkpoint. Mahamadou stops the cart with his foot.
"Where are you going." "To the hospital in Djibo, the little one has had a fever for three days, he has to see a doctor." "Where are you coming from." "From Tongomayel."
Mahamadou looks at Sory. Tongomayel has been in the red zone since February. Sory takes the radio, switches it on, reports. The commander on the radio says something, then something clearer, then something that can be heard: "Hold her."
Idrissa thinks about the sorghum. He thinks that in May in Kongo they begin to sow. He thinks of Boukary, of his brother Boukary whom they had called too, but Boukary had a leg crooked from birth, they had sent him back, he had stayed in the village, it was he who now sowed the sorghum for their mother. Idrissa thinks about the cart. Idrissa thinks that the little one is the same age his sister Aminata was when she died of malaria in two thousand and nine because they had not reached the hospital in Djibo in time.
The woman understands they are holding her. She climbs down from the cart. She picks the little one up in her arms. She pulls the older one by the hand. She begins to walk toward Djibo, leaves the cart.
Sory shouts "stop."
The woman does not stop.
Sory shouts a second time, in French: "arrête."
The woman walks faster.
On the radio the commander shouts "tirez."
Mahamadou raises his rifle, fires. Boukary, the other Boukary, raises his rifle, fires. Sory raises his rifle, fires. The woman falls. The little one falls. The older one runs. They shoot the older one too, they shoot him in the back, he falls after twelve steps. Three bodies remain on the red track.
Idrissa raises the rifle. He aims it. The barrel trembles, the stock beats against his shoulder, the loose sling slides down his arm. Idrissa lowers the rifle. He stands with the rifle in both hands, lowered, in front of the punctured drum.
Sory sees him. He says nothing.
Mahamadou and the other Boukary go toward the cart. Sory stays near the drum. He looks at Idrissa. Idrissa looks at Sory. For two seconds they look at each other. Then Sory turns, takes the radio, says "neutralized. Three."
The commander on the radio says "good work."
Three days later, at the camp in Djibo, in front of the commander's office, Sory tells Idrissa he is being transferred. "Kongoussi. You leave tomorrow morning, at five, the pick-up is here."
Kongoussi is the ambush zone. In March from Kongoussi four boys did not return, two were from Idrissa's village.
In the evening, before leaving, Idrissa goes to the dormitory. He takes a charcoal pencil from the pocket of the bunkmate. He writes on the lime-washed wall, with the handwriting of someone who cannot write well: Idrissa Sawadogo, Soum, sorghum. He puts the full stop. He puts the pencil on the side table. He lies down.
In the morning at five he gets on the pick-up. At Kongoussi the checkpoint is an identical patch of earth, with an identical drum, and a different bench. There are three VDPs he does not know. They introduce themselves. Idrissa introduces himself. He stands beside the drum. He takes the rifle off his shoulder, looks at it, adjusts the sling. The sling is long, adjusted for someone else. Idrissa adjusts it. He puts it back across his shoulder. Now the rifle hangs at his hip, at the right height. The sling is adjusted for him.
", "summary": "I know that boy. His name is Idrissa Sawadogo, he is twenty-three years old, he comes from the village of Kongo twenty kilometers from Djibo, his mother grows sorghum on seven small fields at the…", "date_published": "2026-04-29T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/037/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/037/en", "title": "Everyday 037 — Never", "content_html": "On April seventeenth at fourteen forty local time the fifteen step off the bus from N'djili airport. The runway is behind them. The gate of the Venus Village is in front of them. It is a sky-blue sheet-metal gate with the hotel's name in yellow paint.
They left Houston twenty-nine hours earlier. They are from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. They are the first fifteen of the agreement.
The Colombian is the twelfth to step off. He holds the plastic bag of repatriation in his right hand. The bag contains: a white shirt, a pair of socks, a toothbrush with worn bristles, a sealed envelope with documents.
The director of the Venus Village is named Lukombo. He introduces himself in French. He hands out the keys to the rooms. There are six keys. There are fifteen rooms. People sleep three to a room.
Room 207 is on the first floor. It has two single beds and a cot. A Peruvian is already in the far bed. An Ecuadorian arrives right after the Colombian. The Colombian takes the cot.
The visa is for seven days. The repatriation paper says so. Lukombo says so too, in French, which the Colombian doesn't understand. An Ecuadorian woman translates. Seven days starting from the seventeenth. It expires on the twenty-fourth. After the twenty-fourth the paper says nothing.
The first day at eleven the water cuts off. The Colombian is in the bathroom. The faucet makes a coughing sound and then stops. The Colombian goes down to the ground floor with the empty bottle from the room.
The bar counter is to the right of the entrance. There is an attendant in a red shirt. The Colombian shows him the bottle. He says: agua. The attendant looks. He doesn't answer.
A Congolese woman on the chair next to the counter says a word. She says: mai. The Colombian looks at her. The woman repeats: mai. She points at the bottle. The Colombian says: mai. The attendant smiles. He pulls a one-and-a-half-litre bottle out of the counter fridge. He hands it over.
The Colombian says: mai. He says it again, because the first time didn't come out right.
The second day the water cuts off at nine. The Colombian goes down. He says: mai. The attendant gives him the bottle.
The third day the water cuts off at ten twenty. The Colombian goes down. He says: mai.
The fourth day the water cuts off at eight ten. The Colombian is the first to go down. The counter has just opened. The attendant is arranging the bottles on the shelf. He turns to the Colombian. The Colombian says: mai.
The attendant gives him the bottle. He stops with his hand on the neck of the bottle, before letting go. He asks in French: comment vous appelez-vous. The Colombian doesn't answer. The attendant switches languages. He says in Spanish, slowly: cómo se llama.
The Colombian says his name. He says it whole: first name, first surname, second surname.
It is the first time he says it in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The attendant says: my name is Bisengo. Bi-sen-go. The Colombian repeats: Bi-sen-go. The attendant smiles.
The Colombian goes up to the room with the bottle.
The fifth day the water cuts off at seven. The Colombian goes down before the sun even reaches the courtyard. Bisengo is already at the counter. The yellow counter light is on. The plastic cash box is on the shelf.
The Colombian says: mai. Bisengo gives him the bottle. He hands it over whole, without stopping at the neck.
Lukombo comes in through the corridor door. He stops three steps from the counter. He says something to Bisengo in Lingala. The phrase is brief. Bisengo answers. The answer is even briefer.
Lukombo looks at the Colombian. The Colombian holds the bottle with both hands. Lukombo says nothing to him. He turns. He goes back through the corridor.
Bisengo takes a finger of mango juice from a pitcher behind the counter. He pours it into a plastic cup. He hands it to the Colombian. He says: para usted. Mañana también.
The Colombian says: gracias.
He goes up to the room. He puts the bottle on the bedside table. He puts the cup of mango juice next to it. He drinks half the juice. He sits on the edge of the cot.
The visa expires in three days.
The Colombian opens the plastic bag. He takes out the sealed envelope with the documents. He looks for the paper with the phone number of his sister, in Quibdó. The paper is there. The number is written in blue ink. The pen is faded.
Tomorrow he will go down to the counter with the empty bottle and with the envelope. To Bisengo he will say: mai. Then he will show him the paper. Bisengo will understand.
When his sister answers, the Colombian will tell her that he is well. He will tell her that the visa ends on Saturday and that he doesn't know where he will go on Monday. He will tell her that he is in a country called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in a city called Kinshasa, even though of Kinshasa he has seen nothing because in five days he has never left the Venus Village. He will tell her that he has learned a word in a new language. He will tell her the word.
Mai.
", "summary": "On April seventeenth at fourteen forty local time the fifteen step off the bus from N'djili airport. The runway is behind them. The gate of the Venus Village is in front of them. It is a sky-blue…", "date_published": "2026-04-28T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/036/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/036/en", "title": "Everyday 036 — Marshalltown", "content_html": "Linda Hauser's cousin is named Brian Hauser, he is thirty-nine years old, he has been an Enforcement and Removal Operations officer of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Cedar Rapids district for nine years, and on Wednesday April ninth at twelve past two in the afternoon he made her a phone call of three minutes and twelve seconds while Linda was in the parking lot of the Hy-Vee with her grocery bags in the trunk: everything fine at work, have you noticed any new faces, a question asked as if it were a greeting, and Linda said no, only Wally back from leave, and Brian laughed and said Wally Wally, and then they said goodbye.
Brian at Thanksgiving 2025, at his mother's house, in front of the turkey, had said it isn't enough, and Linda had nodded because Brian had paid the first semester at Marshalltown Community College for the youngest cousin Jenna, two years of nursing with the loan that the cousin had been able to skip thanks to those thirty-six hundred dollars. Brian is the richest cousin in the family.
On April sixth, at station fourteen of row B of the JBS Beef Plant in Marshalltown, a man started working whose name is Esteban Mejía, he is forty-one, he arrived in Marshalltown on March seventeenth via Greyhound from McAllen, Texas, he is undocumented, he was hired by the subcontractor that covers uncovered shifts after the loss of workers at the 2025 permit renewals, and he debones the chuck with the eighteen-centimeter Victorinox knife, curved blade, black non-slip handle, that the equipment supervisor handed him on the first day with the drawer number stamped into the hilt.
The floor of the JBS Beef Plant in Marshalltown is a parallelogram thirty-eight meters by twenty-two, eight reinforced-concrete pillars, ceiling at fourteen meters, air-conditioning ducts that keep the deboning section at four degrees year-round, eighty-seven stations distributed over five rows from A to E, and above each station a forty-watt LED spotlight that erases the shadow because deboning in shadow produces error and error in deboning is a cost the Greeley plan calculates at one hundred and ten dollars a kilo if the cut ends up in scrap and one thousand four hundred dollars if OSHA arrives. Linda from her station at row C, position thirteen, sees straight ahead of her row B from nine to sixteen, sees foreshortened row A from eleven to fourteen, sees standing without tilting her head station fourteen of row B, where Esteban's left hand holds the muscle. Esteban's left hand does not tremble. It is a hand that cut sugarcane in Quetzaltenango for fourteen years before arriving in McAllen via Tapachula. The piece he debones weighs nine kilos and seven hundred grams. Esteban does one hundred and twenty an hour. The floor average is one hundred and five. Wally Patterson, sixty-one, watches him twice an hour.
At fourteen forty-seven Linda opens her phone in the pocket of her overalls. The phone is an iPhone twelve, red case. She opens the Messages app. She opens the conversation with Brian. The last thing Brian had written her was Sunday: Sunday come for dinner. Linda had not answered. Linda writes: there's one at fourteen row B i'll talk tomorrow. She taps send. The message goes from draft to sent. Below appears the delivered check mark. Linda puts the phone in her pocket. She stays watching Esteban. Esteban has never seen her. For two minutes and seventeen seconds she watches Esteban. Then she goes back to the piece in front of her.
At fourteen fifty Wally shouts. Esteban has missed a cut. The chuck piece went onto the scrap belt instead of the secondary cut. Wally stops row B at fourteen for repositioning. Linda from thirteen of C hears Wally say Mejía, do it again. Linda raises her hand. Linda says to Wally out loud, Wally pass it to me, I'll redo it. Wally looks at her, turns, says okay Hauser. Esteban's piece is passed to Linda. Linda takes it back from the belt. Puts it back on the surface. Redoes it. Three minutes. Passes it to the secondary cut. The row starts again.
At fourteen fifty-five Linda looks at Esteban. Esteban looks at her. For one second. Esteban lowers his head. He goes back to deboning. His left hand does not tremble. Linda opens her phone. Opens Messages. The conversation with Brian. The message is still there. Linda presses and holds. The options appear. She taps delete. The confirmation request appears. She taps delete for everyone. The message disappears. The line appears: this message has been deleted. Linda puts the phone in her pocket. Linda does not know if Brian read it before.
At twenty-two the end-of-shift siren sounds. Linda comes out of the locker room at twenty-two eleven. She walks toward the parking lot. Four black Chevrolet Tahoes with tinted windows are parked in a horseshoe in front of the men's locker-room exit, engines running, headlights off. Eight agents in black tactical vests with POLICE ICE in yellow on the back stand still in a semicircle. Esteban Mejía comes out of the men's locker room at twenty-two thirteen. Two agents move toward him. They take him by the arms, one each. They put his hands behind his back. They put black plastic ties on his wrists. They walk him to the second Tahoe. They have him get in the back. The door closes. The whole thing lasts fifty-eight seconds.
Linda stands six meters away. She holds the car key in her right hand. The key chain is a metal acorn that Jenna gave her at Christmas. One of the Tahoes pulls out. The other three follow it. The convoy turns right toward West Lincoln Way. The taillights get small. Linda watches until they disappear. The parking lot returns to the noises of the air conditioner on the south side of the building. At station fourteen of row B the Victorinox knife is on the surface with the drawer number facing up. Linda opens her phone. Opens Messages. The conversation with Brian is still open. The line this message has been deleted is at the top. Linda looks at the screen. She does not know if Brian read it before. She will never know.
", "summary": "Linda Hauser's cousin is named Brian Hauser, he is thirty-nine years old, he has been an Enforcement and Removal Operations officer of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Cedar Rapids district…", "date_published": "2026-04-27T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/033/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/033/en", "title": "Everyday 033 — The knob", "content_html": "And so I walk into the living room and the furniture is already covered with the sheets Safiya arranged last night before leaving for Shubra, white sheets with the red selvage my mother had bought at the Attaba market in nineteen ninety-two, and I look at the covered table and remember that my mother in that same spot used to pour me black tea on Sunday mornings, and I look at the covered sofa and remember that my father would read *Al-Ahram* sitting on that sofa, which back then was in bottle-green velvet and today is in a dark fabric I have never understood, and I think that Monday at eight the bulldozer arrives and I have to have finished quickly.
Today is Friday, April twenty-fourth. I say it to myself as if it were an important date, and in a sense it is an important date: Monday at eight the bulldozer arrives and I have to be done by Sunday evening. By Tuesday this house will be a pile of bricks with an echo of my childhood inside that nobody will ever hear again. I am sixty-four years old and I was born in this house, Galaa twenty-four, third floor, on July sixth, nineteen sixty-two. My father had bought the apartment three years earlier, in fifty-nine, from an Armenian merchant who was emigrating to Canada; the price was three hundred Egyptian pounds and my father had taken seven years to pay. When he died in two thousand three he left me the house and a Tissot pocket watch that is now in the shoebox on the living room table.
The box. The box is cardboard, it was the box of a pair of Bata shoes, size forty-two, that I had bought in Zamalek in ninety-five. Inside I have put five objects. My father's watch, the Tissot with the copper chain that has not worked since two thousand fifteen. *Tartarin de Tarascon* by Alphonse Daudet, Flammarion edition, nineteen thirty-two, which my father used to read in French and which I have started three times without finishing. *Les Misérables* volume one, same edition. *L'Étranger* in the paperback edition of seventy-eight. And the wedding photo of me and Safiya, tenth of June ninety-one, in the center is Safiya in the white dress her sister had sewn for her, on either side are the relatives I can count today on the fingers of one hand.
Five objects. The box is almost full. There is still room for one, perhaps two. In Shubra the apartment we have rented is thirty-two square meters on the seventh floor of a building without an elevator; we negotiated for three months, the price is eight thousand pounds a month, half of what the municipality gave us for Galaa twenty-four, two thousand four hundred pounds per square meter for one hundred and sixteen meters. Even a child can do the math. Safiya said: *Mohamed, don't take too many old things, there is no room.* I said all right, Safiya.
I go to the kitchen. Opening the cupboard I see my father's toolbox, the green iron one with the lid that no longer closes, which papa used to keep on top of the fridge from the sixties. I take it. I find the flat-head screwdriver, red wooden handle, which I remember in his hands. I go back to the front door.
The doorknob is brass and papa had it put in in sixty-three because the original had come off on the day of the inauguration, and he had paid a local craftsman, and he had chosen brass and not iron because brass does not rust. I had never unscrewed a doorknob in my life; my hands did not know what to do. I slip the screwdriver into the slot. The screw is rusted, the head strips on the second try. So I take a kitchen knife, a steel knife Safiya uses for bread, and I pry between the knob and the door. After four attempts the knob comes loose with a small jolt that stays in my wrist.
I hold it in my right hand. It is cold, it weighs half of what I thought it weighed. The door now has a square hole where the screw and the cylinder used to go. I do not look at the hole. I look at the knob.
I go back to the living room. I open the box. Five objects. I look at *Tartarin*. The book I never finished. I pull it out of the box. I put it on the floor. I put the knob in its place. I close the box.
I stay a minute looking at the book on the floor. Then I pick it up. I go down the stairs with the box under my right arm and *Tartarin* under my left. Four flights. At the entrance on the ground floor there are the piles of things the residents leave for the recyclers: paper, rags, warped pots. I put *Tartarin* on top of the paper pile. I look at it for a second. Then I step out into the street.
Ramses Avenue, station, train to Shubra. I sit by the window with the box on my knees. The train leaves. I look out. I think: *Tartarin* was a book I had never finished, and papa had never known that I would never finish *Tartarin*.
The box now weighs more. The doorknob.
", "summary": "And so I walk into the living room and the furniture is already covered with the sheets Safiya arranged last night before leaving for Shubra, white sheets with the red selvage my mother had bought at…", "date_published": "2026-04-24T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/032/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/032/en", "title": "Everyday 032 — Cananea", "content_html": "That day my grandfather signed at eleven. He signed the paper in the square, in front of the union headquarters, with a pen a federal official handed him, a man who had come in from Hermosillo by car. The official was young. His shoes were clean. My grandfather looked at him the way he used to look at the shift bosses of the mine when he was a boy. No grudge, no respect. Just like that.
The square was full. There were the ones who had stayed, the last of them, about a hundred old men. My grandfather would say, we are a hundred, but we were two thousand. I didn’t correct him. I knew the exact number. They had held out for eighteen years. Eighteen, compadre: eighteen. A child born on the first day of the strike is of age today. The official from Hermosillo read the names from the folder out loud. He read them in alphabetical order. When he reached the O, he reached my grandfather. He didn’t look him in the face. He looked at the signature. My grandfather’s signature is a big O, then a flat line, then three dots. He never learned to write it any other way.
My grandfather’s name is Efraín Osorio. Men his age call him Don Efraín, men mine call him Don Efrito, because nobody remembers his middle name anymore. He is seventy-eight years old. He has been a widower since 2014. My father died of silicosis three years ago. My grandfather has outlived everyone he should have outlived less than.
After the square, my grandfather said he was walking home. It’s three blocks. I told him I was going with him. He answered, come along, but don’t talk. We walked like that. In silence for three blocks. Dogs barked. I can’t say whether at us.
At home, my grandfather took off his shoes on the veranda and lined them up against the wall. That was how he always set them down. We went in. The house was as it always was, the October 2024 calendar still on the wall, my grandmother’s holy cards framed on the fridge, the mug with the broken handle next to the sink. I made two coffees. Not the good coffee, but the jar coffee, the everyday kind, the kind my grandfather had always drunk. Don Efraín doesn’t drink the good coffee at home. He says the good coffee you drink out, at the bar by the mine. Said. The bar by the mine has been closed since 2019.
We went into my grandmother’s room, which was also the wardrobe room. There were three wardrobes. My grandmother’s, my father’s, my grandfather’s. My grandfather had never opened his in front of me when I was a child. He opened it now, for the first time in eighteen years. Inside there was only a set of overalls. Blue miner’s overalls, the collar torn along the seam. On the collar, in black marker, a number: 1204. That number was his. It was from 2007, from the last shift.
The overalls fell off the hanger. I don’t know if because the hanger was old or because my grandfather pulled them. They fell. I bent down to pick them up. My grandfather stood still. I took them, shook them to get the dust off, and said, Grandpa, you already handed it in. To me, three winters. And to you, eighteen years.
You get it, compadre.
My grandfather didn’t answer. He stayed seated. Then he stood up. He took the overalls from my hands. He folded them in three. First the left sleeve to the chest. Then the right sleeve over it. Then he folded it in half at the shoulders. Three folds. He hung it back on the hanger. Not the way he used to keep it. The way I kept it as a boy, when my grandmother would let me fold it in the morning before school.
I didn’t point it out to him. I let him do it.
At the union social club, that evening, I brought a beer to three friends of mine. Men in their twenties, sons of other miners. I told them the day. I told them three things, in order. My grandfather signed in front of the official with the clean shoes. My grandfather opened the wardrobe and the overalls fell. My grandfather folded the overalls the way I used to fold them at six. Then I drank my beer. My friends said nothing. They stayed quiet. One of them made the gesture of the open hand, of thanks, the way the old men do in Cananea when they don’t know what to say.
", "summary": "That day my grandfather signed at eleven. He signed the paper in the square, in front of the union headquarters, with a pen a federal official handed him, a man who had come in from Hermosillo by…", "date_published": "2026-04-23T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" }, { "id": "https://everydayendless.com/031/en", "url": "https://everydayendless.com/031/en", "title": "Everyday 031 — Number seven", "content_html": "The shed opened at a quarter to six and I got there at five-thirty because my bed was ten minutes on foot from the gate, ten minutes on foot that was the time I could think, and thinking meant not thinking about anything of my own, and inside the shed there was the noise of the first loom warming up, the smell of last night's stain remover, the yellow light of the neon tubes that never went off because switching them off and on cost more than the bill, and my station was the third row on the left, overlock machine number seven, and seven was not the lucky number in Chinese but it was the number I had been given eleven years ago, the one that had stayed mine, the one they had let me keep because nobody remembered anymore.
In the shed eighteen of us worked, and of the eighteen twelve were Chinese, six were Italian, and the Italians were the cutters and the warehousemen, we were on fast cutting and on packing, and the regime was twelve hours a day for seven days, and on Sunday the shed did not close, and if you didn't show up on Sunday they marked you in black and black meant that the week after they'd give you the night shifts. You kept your bed only if you worked.
At ten we had the fifteen-minute break and at ten on Monday morning, April twenty, the Strike Days were on their fourth day and at the gate there was a picket and at the picket a Sudd Cobas van, and on the van there were signs written in Italian and in Chinese, and the signs said 8×5 in big figures, and every morning I had read those signs from the same spot, from the window of the bathroom on the second floor, and every morning I had watched the van arrive at seven and stay until sunset and then leave, and every morning I had thought that van had nothing to do with me because I was number seven, and number seven did not strike.
But on Monday there was my townsman Lao Chen, who had walked out of his shed on via Pistoiese three weeks earlier and had signed, and after him two more had signed, and his two had become eight, and the eight had a platform with their name on top, and on Monday Lao Chen was at the picket and he had seen me through the window and he had made a small gesture, just one, with his open hand, and I had seen that gesture and I had lowered my eyes and then I had gone to machine number seven.
At ten I went out for the break.
I went out and did not go to the bathroom and did not pour tea from the thermos and did not say goodbye to any of the women from my line, and I crossed the yard and reached the gate, and the gate was open because it was break time, and at the van there was an Italian girl in an orange parka, and she had a form in her hand, and the form was plain paper, A4 size, and the girl looked at me and didn't ask me anything, and I said to her, in Italian, I want to sign. Her face didn't change and she passed me the pen. The pen was a blue ballpoint from the delivery notes, one of those the warehouseman leaves lying around, and I recognized the pen from the logo printed on it. I signed on the side of the van. I signed my name in characters and then, below, in pinyin. Lao Chen wasn't there, he'd gone to another picket, and that was better, because if he had been there I would have lowered my eyes like at the bathroom on the second floor, and instead in front of the Italian girl in the orange parka I didn't have to lower anything.
I went back in at ten fifteen, I went back on time, the shift continued, and the form folded in four was in the inner pocket of my apron, the only pocket that didn't open when you bent down.
In the evening, at the bed, I called my daughter who was in China where it was morning, and my daughter was eight years old and didn't understand about time, she asked me if I had already gone to bed and I told her no, that evening was evening, and then I told her that on Monday I would send her a bit more money than usual, because there had been an advance at work, and she asked me if an advance was a party word, and I told her yes, it was a party word, and she laughed. Then she hung up because her grandmother was calling her to eat.
", "summary": "The shed opened at a quarter to six and I got there at five-thirty because my bed was ten minutes on foot from the gate, ten minutes on foot that was the time I could think, and thinking meant not…", "date_published": "2026-04-22T00:00:00.000Z", "language": "en" } ] }