Everyday Endless (English)

Everyday 052 — Ventitré

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Liuyang, Hunan, Cina. L'esplosione del 4 maggio 02026 alla fabbrica di fuochi Huasheng ha causato 37 morti e 51 feriti; in gennaio l'azienda era stata multata di 15.000 yuan per due violazioni nel workshop. China Daily, SCMP, US News, 4–10 maggio 02026.

Everyday 015 — La stanza 14

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I cleaned room 14 every night for nine years and I cleaned it always in the same order, first the floor by the door, then the floor around the bed, then the bathroom, then the windowsill, and the order mattered because the order was the thing that kept me awake, that kept me going from one room to the next without thinking, and when I wasn’t thinking I worked better and when I worked better the time passed and when the time passed dawn came and I could go home. The shoes were blue, electric blue with white rubber soles, and my daughter had given them to me three years ago saying « in hospital you need cheerful shoes » and I had put them on and never taken them off, I washed them every Sunday in the tub with Marseille soap and set them to dry on the balcony and by Monday they were ready. In the breast pocket of my scrubs I kept a lipstick, a brick-colored lipstick I never wore at work but checked was there every time I changed, I touched it with my fingers through the fabric and if I felt it everything was fine and if I didn’t feel it a stupid agitation seized me, out of all proportion, as if the lipstick were something serious and not a lipstick. (It was something serious. I don’t know why, but it was.) The cart was in the corridor, with the products lined up the way I lined them up, detergent on the left, cloths in the middle, black bag on the right, and the wheels made a sound I knew, a sound that was my sound, and I could hear it from far away when a colleague moved the cart by mistake and I knew it wasn’t me pushing it because the wheels sounded different.

The shift began at ten and ended at six and between ten and six the world was a corridor with fluorescent lights and numbered doors and the silence of patients who slept and the noise of machines that never slept. The head nurse that night was Ferretti, a lean woman with short grey hair who spoke little and when she spoke said precise things. « Marta, room 14 has a new patient, watch the catheter » she told me in passing, and I nodded and pushed the cart and the wheels made their sound and I went. My son sent me a voice message every evening at eleven, every evening, and I listened to it in the corridor between 14 and 15 with the phone close to my ear and the volume low, and he said ordinary things, « mum the dog ate a shoe » and « mum goodnight », and his voice split the night in two, and after the message the work was lighter. That night in the break room the television was on and nobody was watching it, and I went in to get water and saw the images, a bombed hospital in a place I couldn’t name, and the newsreader was saying seven healthcare workers killed and the corridors were the same, the same fluorescent lights and the same numbered doors and the same floor, and I stood there with the glass in my hand and watched for a minute and then I left, and the water in the glass was shaking because my hand was shaking, and I was ashamed of the hand that shook because it hadn’t happened to me, but the doors were the same and the lights were the same and the floor was the same.

I went into room 14. The patient was asleep, breathing steady, the sheet up to his chest, the catheter on the right side of the bed. I pushed the cart in and the wheels made the sound and the patient did not wake. I started with the floor by the door, as always, the damp cloth on the linoleum, long strokes from right to left. Then the floor around the bed. Then the bathroom. In the bathroom there was a chair, a pale blue plastic chair that shouldn’t have been there, that someone had moved from the corridor, and the chair was between the sink and the wall and it blocked the corner. I could move the chair. But moving the chair would make noise and the noise would wake the patient and the woken patient would complain and the complaint would reach Ferretti and Ferretti would note it down. Or I could leave the chair and clean around it and the corner would stay dirty and no one would see. I left the chair. I cleaned around it. The corner stayed dirty. I finished the bathroom, came back into the room, and before leaving I stopped at the window. I had never stopped at the window in room 14. Nine years and I had never looked out of that window. (I had never stopped at that window. Nine years and I had never looked out.) There was the car park, and the parked cars, and a streetlamp on, and behind the streetlamp the wall of the cardiology ward, and behind the wall the sky that was black and starless. There was nothing to see. But I stayed. I stayed ten seconds, maybe fifteen, with the cloth in my hand and the blue shoes on the linoleum and the cart behind me with the products lined up, and I looked out and out there was nothing and I looked all the same.

I finished the shift at six and four minutes. I put the cart back in the storeroom, the products lined up, a new black bag. I changed in the locker room, took off the blue shoes and put them in the locker, checked the lipstick in the breast pocket before hanging up the scrubs, it was there, I felt it with my fingers. I went out the back, crossed the car park, got in the car. The car was cold and the seats were damp and the windscreen had condensation. I took out my phone and listened to my son’s message, the eleven o’clock one I hadn’t yet listened to because at eleven I was in the corridor between 14 and 15 and the television in the break room was showing the bombed hospital and I hadn’t listened. « Mum, today the dog stole a sock and carried it under the bed and I can’t get it out. Goodnight. » I said goodnight to the phone after the message had ended. I said it out loud, in the cold car, with the fogged windscreen and the hospital behind me with its lights on. Room 14 was clean. The bathroom corner wasn’t, the bathroom corner was dirty, and tomorrow night I would clean it. The cart was in the storeroom. The blue shoes were in the locker. The lipstick was in the breast pocket. My son was asleep. The dog was asleep with the sock under the bed. I started the engine and turned on the headlights and the car park turned yellow and I drove off, and the hospital in the rear-view mirror had its lights on, all the lights on, and room 14 was one of those lights.

Hospital cleaning workers: an invisible workforce. Between forty-one and seventy-six percent report moderate or severe stress, burnout, secondary trauma. Night work on hospital wards follows strict protocols, crucial to hospital-acquired infections, without recognition as healthcare personnel. Social Work, 2025. Healthcare workers under bombardment: seven killed in a hospital struck in Sudan. April 2026.

Everyday 014 — Il suono

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had been playing for fourteen years and had never thought of sound as something that could end. I played, that was all. I got up in the morning and made coffee, Najjar powder with cardamom, and took the violin from its case, and Zaatar climbed down from the case because Zaatar slept on the case, and Zaatar was the cat, the building's cat, meaning nobody's, meaning mine. I tuned up and set the violin on my shoulder and my shoulder knew that weight and the weight was the first sound of the day, before the bow, before the string. I played in the conservatory orchestra, second row, third stand. The orchestra existed because a French program had decided it should exist and the conductor was a Frenchman called Morel who smoked Gitanes even during rehearsals, in the sense that he stepped out every twenty minutes and came back smelling of Gitanes and nobody knew where he bought them because you couldn't find Gitanes anywhere anymore, like many other things. The tinnitus had started in March, after the night they hit the southern suburbs and the apartment windows shook for forty seconds and my mother called from the mountains and said come up here and I said I'm fine and she said at least the cat and I said the cat's fine and the next day the windows were intact but in my ears a thin whistle had stayed, continuous, like a bow held still on the fourth string that nobody was playing. The doctor said it wasn't the explosion, it was chronic exposure, the orchestra's decibels, fourteen years without protection. I knew he was right and I knew he wasn't entirely right because the whistle had arrived that night and not another and the body knows when something begins even if the doctor says it had already begun before. (The body is right. The charts are right. It is not the same right.)

The doctor worked in a hospital twenty minutes by taxi when the road was open and fifty when it wasn't and you never knew when the road was open and the taxi cost more than the visit. He had me step into the booth and put on the headphones and I pressed the button when I heard the sound and sometimes I pressed when there was nothing because the whistle in my head and the test tone blurred together. He looked at the chart. "High-frequency loss," he said. "Nothing serious for now." He opened a drawer and took out a small transparent plastic box, the kind you keep buttons in. Inside were two orange plugs, silicone, molded. "Wear them during rehearsals," he said. "Not during concerts, during rehearsals." I took the box and put it in the pocket of the violin case and the box stayed in the pocket for three weeks. (Now I know that three weeks is how long it takes to convince yourself something isn't needed.)

I lived on the third floor of a building in the neighborhood near the port and the doorman was called Walid and he kept my mail when I didn't come down for days and the mail was phone bills and letters from my mother who still wrote letters by hand because she said letters arrive even when the phone has no signal and she was right because sometimes the phone had no signal for hours. Rehearsals were in a ground-floor hall of a building that had once been a cinema and was now the conservatory and you could still see the cinema: the seats had been removed but the floor had the slope and the slope meant the strings sat lower than the winds and the winds played from above and Morel said the slope was an acoustic advantage and I thought Morel said that because he couldn't say otherwise. The tinnitus during rehearsals was worse than at home because at home there was the fridge and there was Zaatar and there was the noise of the street and the street noise was constant, the horns and the generators and the voices and the sirens, and the noise covered the tinnitus, pushed it under, and during rehearsals the street noise was gone and there was the orchestra and the orchestra was loud and after the orchestra there was silence and in the silence the tinnitus was everything.

I tried them on a Tuesday, the plugs, at a dress rehearsal. I opened the box and took the right plug and pushed it into my ear and the world changed. Not the way it changes when you close a door. The way it changes when you lay a cloth over a crystal glass: the sound is still there but muffled, deadened, a sound that is no longer the sound. The first violins played underwater. The oboe came in on the third bar and I didn't hear it come in and not hearing the oboe's entrance is like missing a step going down stairs. I played twenty minutes like that and then pulled it out and the sound came back and the tinnitus came back with it and the two sounds were there together, the orchestra and the whistle that didn't exist, and I played between the two. (I should have persisted with the plugs. I know. But the right sound and the protected sound are not the same sound.)

One Thursday in March, during the rehearsal of the third movement, Morel stopped the orchestra and said "winds, piano" and I heard the whistle and the whistle was louder than usual and my hands were on the strings and the strings vibrated and the whistle was above the strings and I opened the box and took the plug and put it in my left ear and the second violins vanished and the oboe became a noise and my violin was the same but the orchestra around my violin was gone, there was a wall of cotton wool with sounds coming through at random like lights behind a curtain. I took the plug out. The sound came back. I put the plug back in. Outside, beyond the cinema windows, the noise arrived. It wasn't a truck. We all knew it. Morel said nothing. Nobody said anything. The floor shook and the music stands trembled and I had the plug in my left ear and felt the tremor with my right and with my left I felt nothing and for one second the silence in the plugged ear and the noise in the open ear were the same thing the tinnitus did every day, one ear in the world and one ear outside the world, and I thought maybe the plugs weren't the problem, maybe the problem was that I already had one ear inside the war and one inside the music and the two couldn't hear each other. Morel waited for the shaking to stop and said "from the top" and I took the plug out and set it on the stand next to the metronome and we started again from the third movement and outside an ambulance passed and the ambulance was fast and the adagio was slow and I played the adagio and heard the ambulance and heard the tinnitus and the three sounds were one inside the other like three boxes and I was in the smallest box.

That evening the doctor called. The loss had progressed. The left worse than the right. "The plugs," he said. "No," I said. "Why." "Because it isn't the same music." Silence on the other end. Then: "You know that in five years you might not hear the difference between an A and a B flat." (I knew. I didn't answer. I'm not someone who answers things she already knows.) That night they hit the suburbs again and the windows shook and Zaatar jumped off the case and ran under the bed and I sat in the kitchen chair and the fridge hummed and the windows shook and the tinnitus was there beneath everything else and I thought that the tinnitus and the shaking windows did the same work: a sound that sits under other sounds and doesn't leave when the others leave.

In the morning I got up and made coffee and Zaatar was back on the case and Walid was in the courtyard sweeping the glass from a window that hadn't held. I went down and said "good morning" and he said "good morning" and said nothing else and I said nothing else. In my jacket pocket the plug box was closed. The conservatory was fifteen minutes on foot and I walked and the shops were raising their shutters and the shutters made the sound of shutters and the generators made the sound of generators and beneath all the sounds the tinnitus made its own.

Professional orchestra musicians: thirty-one percent report hearing loss, thirty-seven percent tinnitus. Only six percent use protection during rehearsals. Chronic exposure above eighty-five decibels. Frontiers in Public Health, 2025. Health workers in Lebanon: fifty-four killed among fourteen hundred victims of the invasion. April 2026.

Everyday 013 — L'olivo

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Elena told me that the olive, the Olea europaea in the nomenclature Linnaeus fixed in 1753 and that no one has ever contested since because the olive is one of those plants whose taxonomic identity has generated no disputes, unlike for instance the pistachio or certain varieties of prunus that get reclassified every decade, had been cultivated for six thousand years without anyone ever feeling the need to store its seeds in an underground vault carved into the rock of an island in the Arctic Circle, because the olive was the Mediterranean itself, Elena told me in the voice of someone stating a fact that admits no discussion, the olive was the terraced slopes of the Ligurian coast and the dry stone walls of the south and the inland hills where every family owned at least three trees and called them by name the way you call dogs or children by name, and every variety had a name that was a proper name, Cellina di Nardò, Ogliarola del Gargano, Cima di Melfi, Bella di Cerignola, Carolea, Ottobratica, Tonda Iblea, names that contained the place of origin and that without that place meant nothing, because a Cellina di Nardò grown elsewhere was no longer a Cellina di Nardò in the sense the word held for the farmers who had selected it over centuries, it was just an olive tree with a label that no longer corresponded to anything. Elena had worked in the university's plant genetics department for eleven years, she told me, and in eleven years she had prepared deposits for twenty-three varieties of durum wheat, for eighteen legumes native to the Mediterranean basin, for seven grape varieties at risk of disappearing, but not for the olive, never for the olive, because the olive did not need to be preserved, the olive was everywhere, the olive was the plant that did not end.

Then she had seen the data on Xylella. Xylella fastidiosa subspecies pauca, Elena explained to me with the precision of someone who has read every single phytosanitary report published between 2013 and 2025, with the same cadence she would have used to list the entries of an inventory or the stations on a rail line, had probably arrived from Costa Rica through an ornamental coffee plant imported to a nursery in the Salento, and from that nursery had spread carried by the meadow spittlebug, the Philaenus spumarius, a twelve-millimeter insect no one had ever considered a dangerous vector, and now it carried inside itself a bacterium that blocked the xylem vessels of the olive until it died, and in twelve years it had killed twenty-one million in the Puglia region alone, twenty-one million, Elena repeated, and I tried to imagine twenty-one million dead trees and could not because a number like that cannot be imagined, it can be noted, read in a column of a spreadsheet, accepted as data. The most affected varieties were the Ogliarola and the Cellina, the ones with proper names that contained the place in the name, and now the place contained them only as firewood, because an olive tree killed by Xylella dries standing and stays standing for years like an involuntary monument to itself until someone cuts it down to make room for a resistant cultivar, the Leccino or the Favolosa, if there is room, if there is will, if there is money to replant.

Elena prepared the deposit proposal after reading the 2025 report, the one estimating the loss of sixty percent of Puglia's olive oil production compared to 2012, sixty percent in thirteen years, she told me, as though thirteen years were a measure of time enough to erase what six thousand years had built, and in fact they were, thirteen years had been enough. The counterargument was solid and she knew it well, she laid it out herself with the loyalty of someone who respects objections before surpassing them: six thousand years do not need a freezer, the olive grows across the entire Mediterranean basin, millions of trees, no one is cutting them down, Xylella is a regional problem not a threat to the entire species, and placing olive seeds in the Arctic vault meant admitting that nothing was permanent anymore, that six thousand years of survival did not guarantee the six thousand and first. Elena told me the argument was right about everything except one point: Xylella fastidiosa subspecies pauca did not exist in the Mediterranean six thousand years ago, did not exist a thousand years ago, did not exist twenty years ago. The permanence of the olive had been calculated in a world where that bacterium was absent, and that world had ended in 2013 in a nursery in the Salento with an ornamental coffee plant, and from that moment every past year of survival no longer counted as a guarantee of the next, because the conditions had changed and conditions do not reverse. She filled out the forms. Prepared fifty heat-sealed aluminum packets. Wrote the labels by hand before printing them, because she wanted to see the names in her own handwriting at least once, as a form of farewell: Frantoio, Leccino, Coratina, Carolea, Nocellara del Belice, Moraiolo, Taggiasca, Cellina di Nardò.

The label on packet number thirty-seven, the one for the Picual variety, which is not an Italian cultivar but Spanish and which Elena had included in the selection for taxonomic completeness, as she explained to me, because a deposit that does not represent the genetic diversity of the species across its full range is not a deposit but a partial collection, read: Olea europaea, var. Picual, collected March 2026, storage temperature minus eighteen degrees Celsius, and now that label sat on the shelf of corridor twelve of the vault carved into the mountain, into the rock of the island, in the dark, because the corridor lights came on only when someone entered and no one entered, and no one read the label because no one needed to read it, not yet, not now, and perhaps not ever, and the corridor was dark and cold and the packets waited aligned on the metal shelves and waiting was the function for which they had been brought there, the only function, to wait in the dark and the cold for someone to need them.

The Svalbard global seed vault receives olive seeds for the first time. Fifty varieties from the University of Córdoba. The olive has been cultivated for six thousand years and had never been considered at risk. Xylella fastidiosa has killed millions of trees in Puglia. Svalbard Global Seed Vault, March 2026.

Everyday 012 — La voce

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The linguist pressed the button. The woman's voice came out of the recorder, low, with long vowels that Odia does not have and aspirated consonants that Odia does not aspirate, a rhythm unlike any language he had heard in the district. She sat on the veranda with her hands in her lap, legs crossed, her back against the mud wall. The wall had the color mud takes after years of drying in the sun. A sentence came out of the recorder. The woman listened. The sentence was her own voice. He had recorded it two hours earlier, when she had spoken three words in Gorum before noticing the recorder was on. Three words. The first Gorum words the linguist had collected in that village after four days of questions met only with refusal. She looked at the recorder. Not at the linguist. At the black box on the veranda floor, emitting her voice, her voice saying words she had spoken and now denied having spoken. Her mouth was closed. Her eyes held the recorder with the attention one gives to an object that should not exist.

He left at four in the afternoon. She stayed on the veranda. The recorder was gone, packed into his bag, but the place where it had rested was still visible, a rectangle of floor slightly cleaner where the dust had not settled. She looked at the rectangle. Children from the house next door were playing in the courtyard, their voices in Odia filling the space where two hours before her voice in Gorum had come out of the machine. Her granddaughter stepped out of the house, asked her something. In Odia. The woman answered in Odia. The girl was eleven and did not know her grandmother spoke another language. She would not learn. The grandmother would not tell her. The other women in the village would not tell her. The Gorum would remain in the mouths of those who denied it, until those who denied it were gone.

He had arrived on Monday carrying a bag, a recorder, an informed consent form translated into Odia, a list of eleven names. The village chief had identified them as Gorum speakers. Eleven people over fifty. Eleven people who, according to the chief, knew a language no one under thirty spoke anymore, a language no one under fifty admitted to speaking. The linguist knocked on eleven doors. At each one he asked the same question. At each one the answer was no. The no came in Odia. It was polite. It was the correct answer in the correct language, the language that worked, the language that opened the doors of the district office, the school, the hospital, the market. Gorum opened nothing. It was the language of the old, the language of a place that no longer existed, where rice had a different sound, rain had a different sound, tomorrow had a sound that Odia lacked entirely, a sound that perhaps carried a meaning Odia could not hold. He waited. Talked about the weather, the harvest, their children. Four days he waited for someone to let a word slip. On the third day the woman on the list said three words. She said them without thinking, the way one speaks in the language that lives beneath the language one has chosen to speak. The name of a tree, the verb meaning to rain, the word for tomorrow. The recorder was already running. He had not switched it on for her. It had been running for an hour, left on all day in hope of catching the words that escaped without permission.

That evening she sat in front of the house with her neighbor. The neighbor was the same age, bore the same face that belongs to women who have worked the land their whole lives, women the sun has worked in return. They spoke in Odia, about the rice, the rain, the neighbor's son who had gone to Berhampur for work. Then the neighbor said a word. Not Odia. The woman recognized it. She answered with another. Both words were Gorum. Neither acknowledged it. The conversation continued in Odia as though nothing had passed between them. But the two words had been spoken, and the evening air carried them past the courtyard, past the roof, past the hill where the tree grew whose name the woman knew in Gorum and would not say. No recorder caught them. No archive would hold them. No server in Berlin would assign them a catalog number. They would exist only in the memory of two women, in the evening, in the air, in whatever time remained for the women and the evening and the air.

The Gorum language, Munda family, is spoken by approximately twelve thousand people in the Koraput district, Odisha, India. No one under thirty speaks it. Those who know it deny knowing it. Living Tongues Institute; OpenSpeaks Archives, Wikimedia, March 2026.

Everyday 011 — L'articolo

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kittleson's name had been on the newsroom whiteboard since Friday, written with the blue marker they used for correspondents in war zones, and the blue marker meant that the person was in a place where communications could be interrupted and where the interruption of communications was not necessarily an emergency, because in Iraq communications were interrupted for reasons that ranged from electrical blackouts to mobile network congestion during air raids to the simple decision to turn off the phone to sleep, and the newsroom protocol said the blue marker stayed on the whiteboard for forty-eight hours without anyone doing anything and that after forty-eight hours the marker became red and that red meant 'contact the embassy.'

Nora was the foreign desk editor and her job during the forty-eight hours of the blue marker consisted of not doing the job she would do with the red marker, that is not calling the embassy and not calling the Baghdad fixer and not calling the family and not writing anything on the site, because the protocol existed to prevent anxiety from producing actions anxiety should not produce, and Nora's anxiety was a type of anxiety that manifested in the hands, in the hands that went toward the phone and that Nora stopped before the phone was in her hand, every time, every half hour, for forty-eight hours, and Nora's hands were the protocol incarnated in the body, the protocol that said 'not yet' and the hands that said 'now' and the difference between the two that was Nora's job.

Kittleson's last article had arrived Friday morning at six forty-two Baghdad time, twelve forty-two New York time. The article was in the editorial system with the status 'draft' and the provisional title 'The handlers' and the body of the text was one thousand two hundred and forty-seven words and the last sentence was: 'The third intermediary, the one who never gave his name and whom colleagues call the Dentist because.' Because. The sentence ended with 'because' and after 'because' there was nothing, not a period, not a comma, not a space, and the absence of any mark after 'because' meant that Kittleson had stopped writing at that point, at that moment, between the 'because' and what the 'because' would have introduced.

Nora read the article twice. The first time for the content: the intermediaries between armed groups and private security companies, the payments, the money movements. The second time for the structure: the article was built like a concentric-circle investigation, from the outer circle (the public contracts) to the inner circle (the intermediaries), and the innermost circle, the one where the Dentist stood, was the circle where the sentence broke off.

The forty-eight hours of the blue marker passed with the slowness of the forty-eight hours that separate anxiety from procedure. Nora ate at her desk. She slept two hours on the meeting room couch. She checked the whiteboard every time she passed it, and every time Kittleson's name was there, in blue, and the blue meant 'not yet' and Nora's hands stayed at her sides.

At the forty-ninth hour Nora took the red marker and erased the blue and wrote KITTLESON in red. The red on the whiteboard had a different weight from the blue: the blue was information, the red was a decision. Nora called the embassy. The voice on the other end said they had no information on this person and asked for the details of the stay: the hotel, the fixer's name, the date of last contact. Nora gave the details. The voice said they would look into it and call back.

Nora went back to the desk and Kittleson's article was still open on the screen with the cursor blinking after 'because,' and the screen was the only thing in the newsroom that had not moved in the last forty-nine hours, because the newsroom around the screen had continued to function, colleagues had written other articles and answered other phone calls and drunk other coffees and nobody had asked Nora what was on the screen because nobody asked what was on the screen when the marker was red, and the not-asking was another form of protocol, the protocol of silence that surrounds the red name, and Nora sat in front of the 'because' that blinked and the colleagues passed behind her chair without looking at the screen the way one passes behind a person who prays without looking at what she prays to, and the coffee in Nora's cup had gone cold and the cold coffee was the body that had forgotten to drink because the body was doing other work.

The embassy called back three hours later. The voice was different from the first one: slower, with the pauses of someone reading from a sheet. «A person matching the description was seen in a café in the Karrada district on Friday. From that point we have nothing further.» Pause. «We are checking with local authorities.» Nora knew the language of embassies: local authorities meant the Iraqi police, and the Iraqi police in a kidnapping in Baghdad were not the solution.

The editor came by Nora's desk at three in the afternoon and asked if Kittleson had sent the article, and Nora said the article was in the system since Friday, and the editor asked if it was complete, and Nora said the last word was 'because' and that after 'because' there was nothing, and the editor looked at the screen and read the sentence and stood behind Nora's chair for eleven seconds that Nora counted because counting seconds had become her way of being inside the forty-eight hours, and the editor said «File it» and went back to his office and the door closed with the sound of doors that close when the person closing them has already decided.

Nora waited for the editor's door to close. She waited for the footsteps in the corridor to fade. Then she put her hands on the keyboard and her hands did the work her hands knew how to do: the cursor on the panel, the status from 'draft' to 'published,' the confirmation click. The article went online at four twelve in the afternoon with the title 'The handlers' and the last word was 'because.' The reader arrived at the end and found the 'because' without an answer and the 'because' without an answer was more powerful than any answer because the reader knew the answer existed and the answer was in a place where the journalist could no longer reach it, and the place where the journalist could no longer reach it was the place where the journalist was now.

American journalist Shelly Kittleson kidnapped in Baghdad. Last contact Friday, Karrada district. She was working on an investigation into intermediaries between armed groups and private security companies. BBC, April 2, 2026.

Everyday 010 — Il decimo

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Frank's notebook weighed three hundred and twenty grams, he had weighed it once out of curiosity on the laboratory scale, the one used for dosing the coagulant, and three hundred and twenty grams had seemed like too little for thirty years of things nobody else knew, thirty years of valve sounds and joints that give way and pumps that change tone before breaking and that way water has of changing smell when the iron in old pipes begins to dissolve, a smell the protocol calls 'metallic taste' and that Frank called 'the pipe is eating itself' because the pipe was indeed eating itself, layer by layer, the way rust eats a nail, only that you can see the nail and you cannot see the pipe, the pipe is underground, the pipe is under the road, the pipe is under the school where children drink the water the pipe carries and the pipe carries the water Frank treats and Frank treats the water with his hands and with the notebook and with thirty years of five-a.m. mornings in a plant that next year will cost the district one hundred and forty thousand dollars in maintenance the district does not have and that the district will replace with an automated system that reads the sensors and adjusts the pumps and that will work, 'oh it will work,' it will work at ninety per cent because ninety per cent is what the sensors see and the pumps adjust and the software calculates, but the ten per cent is what Frank does with his fingertips on the flange of valve 7 when the water temperature drops below four degrees.

Frank fell ill in February. A pneumonia, not serious but enough for two weeks at home, two weeks in which the plant ran without Frank because the plant had the sensors and the displays and the software and the new kid the district had sent with his forty-hour certificate and his tablet and his way of looking at the numbers as if the numbers were reality, and the numbers were reality, 'a reality,' the one the sensors produced and the displays showed and the software interpreted, but there was another reality the sensors did not produce and the displays did not show and the software did not interpret, the reality of the sound of valve 7 and the smell of iron and the vibration of the flange and the water hammer the manual does not mention, and that other reality for two weeks was read by nobody.

Frank came back on a Monday. The plant was running. The water was flowing. The displays showed numbers in range. The notebook was on the desk where Frank had left it. Nobody had opened it. Frank opened it to page one hundred and eighty, the last page written, dated February 3, the day before the pneumonia: 'V7 slight vibration, not on display, pH 7.2 (display 7.1, difference 0.1, in range but rising for three days).' Frank went to valve 7 and touched the flange. The vibration was no longer slight. It was constant. The pH on the display read 7.4. The operating range went up to 8.5. No alarm. No new kid who had noticed that the 7.1 of three weeks ago had become 7.4 and that 7.4 was still in range but that the direction mattered more than the number, 'the direction mattered more than the number,' and Frank knew it because in 2009 the pH had risen from 7.0 to 7.6 in four weeks and nobody had noticed until it reached 8.2 and the water began to taste like the pipe and two people had called the district.

Frank corrected. He opened valve 12 by a quarter turn. He checked the coagulant doser. He cleaned the pH sensor that had a limescale deposit shifting the reading by one tenth. One tenth. The tenth that separated the number on the display from the real number, the tenth that separated the world of sensors from the world of fingers, the tenth that Frank corrected every day and that for two weeks nobody had corrected and that in two weeks had become three tenths and that in a year would become a full point and that in one point there were fourteen thousand taps and fourteen thousand glasses of water and fourteen thousand people who did not know the water they drank was good because a man with a three-hundred-and-twenty-gram notebook touched a valve with his fingertips every morning at five ten.

Frank was not indispensable. The plant ran without him. The water flowed. The numbers were in range. The new kid had not called the district, had not noticed the vibration, had not opened the notebook. The system did not need Frank. The system needed someone to press the buttons and read the displays and the new kid did that. But the system did not know that the tenth Frank corrected was the tenth that kept the system from noticing itself, and a system that does not notice itself is a system that works until it doesn't, and when it stops working it stops all at once, suddenly, like a rope that breaks at its thinnest point, and the thinnest point was the point where Frank put his fingertips, the point the display could not see, the point the notebook described with the words of someone who touches and not with the numbers of someone who watches.

The notebook stayed on the desk. Frank did not take it home. He did not hide it. He left it open to page one hundred and eighty, the one from February 3, with the slight vibration and the rising pH and the difference of one tenth between the display and the world. Anyone could have read it. Nobody did.

Thirty to fifty per cent of rural water plant operators in the United States will retire within ten years. Workforce aging has risen among the sector's critical priorities. In small rural systems, the operator is often the only person who knows the plant. AWWA, State of the Water Industry Report, 2025.

Everyday 009 — Il tetto

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Elif heard the impact at four eleven in the morning. Not the impact of war, which in Gaziantep was a sound that came from far away and that the walls muffled until it seemed like thunder from a storm that was not there. This impact was on the roof. The roof of the house shook like a table someone pounds a fist on, a brief sharp tremor that made the plaster of the children's bedroom ceiling fall in three spots.

The children did not wake. The younger one turned in bed. The older one pulled up the blanket. Elif stood in the doorway of their room for a time she did not measure. She looked at the ceiling. The three spots where the plaster had fallen were three dark marks on the white. The white of the ceiling was the white Elif had painted in August with the cheapest paint that covered worst but was enough for a children's room.

In the morning Elif went up to the roof. The steps of the external staircase were cement and the third step had a crack that had been widening for two winters. The roof was flat, covered with tar and gravel, and on the tar there were pieces of metal.

Four pieces. The biggest was the length of a forearm. The smallest fit in the palm of a hand. They were grey, with jagged edges, as if something whole had broken in the air and the pieces had fallen where the wind carried them. On the big piece there was writing. Elif could not read the language. The letters were not Latin and not Arabic. The metal was still warm.

Elif took the oven gloves. Not the rubber gloves for dishes: the cotton gloves for the oven, the ones with the floral pattern her mother had given her the year before. She picked up the big piece and put it in the wheelbarrow that stood in the corner of the roof where she kept the spare gravel. The piece weighed more than it seemed. The metal had a density her hands associated with something not made to fall on a roof.

The neighbor, Mehmet, was on his roof. His roof also had pieces. Mehmet was picking them up with bare hands.

«Missile,» Mehmet said from above the dividing wall.

«Whose?»

«The radio says Iranian. They shot it down above us.»

Elif looked at the pieces in the wheelbarrow. An Iranian missile shot down by Turkish air defense. The debris had fallen on Gaziantep. On two roofs, maybe twenty, maybe a hundred. Nobody had died. Elif knew this because she did not hear ambulance sirens, and ambulance sirens in Gaziantep could be heard from any point in the city because the city was in a valley and the sirens bounced off the hills.

The second piece was smaller. She put it in the wheelbarrow. The third was stuck in the tar, had pierced the surface layer and lodged in the sublayer. Elif pulled it out. Under the piece the tar was melted, a dark circle five centimeters wide where the hot metal had dissolved the surface. The hole was above the children's room. Elif looked at the hole. The piece had gone through the tar and stopped before the concrete. The concrete had held. The children slept under the concrete that had held.

Elif put the third piece in the wheelbarrow without looking at it.

The fourth piece was the one with writing. Elif picked it up with the floral gloves and turned it. The writing was in Farsi, but Elif did not know that. She knew the writing was on a piece of metal that had fallen on the roof of the room where her children slept, and that the writing had been written by someone who did not know where that piece would fall, and that the piece had not fallen where it was supposed to because someone else had shot it down first, and the downing had produced the pieces, and the pieces had fallen on Elif's roof and Mehmet's roof and the roofs of Gaziantep like a hail of metal no weather forecast announces.

Elif carried the wheelbarrow to the edge of the stairs. She brought the pieces down one at a time. She put them in the car boot. She drove to the municipal dump. The dump had an attendant who looked at the pieces and said «we've already received twenty this morning.» Elif left the pieces. She did not sign anything. There was no form for missile debris.

She went home. She went up to the roof. She looked at the hole in the tar. Five centimeters. She opened the bucket of spare pitch she kept next to the gravel. She poured the pitch into the hole. The pitch was black and thick and covered the melted circle and covered the point where the piece had stopped and covered the distance between the metal and the concrete and between the concrete and the bed and between the bed and the children.

Elif smoothed the pitch with the spatula. The roof was flat again. The impact of four eleven was under a layer of fresh pitch that would dry by evening. The children would come back from the neighbor where she had taken them in the morning and would go to bed and would not see the three spots of fallen plaster on the ceiling because Elif would have covered them first, with the cheapest paint that covered worst but was enough.

Turkey and NATO forces shoot down an Iranian ballistic missile violating Turkish airspace. Debris falls on the province of Gaziantep. No deaths. Iran had launched two missiles toward Cyprus, both intercepted. March 31, 2026.

Everyday 008 — Il terzo piano

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Damari heard the hum change pitch at two seventeen in the morning and knew the grid was about to go down before it went. She had worked as a night guard at the Ismail Road building for four years, and in four years she had learned that the transformer in the courtyard changed voice when the load on the line climbed too high, and that the hum became a whistle, and that the whistle lasted between five and ten seconds before everything went dark.

The whistle lasted seven seconds. Then the dark.

Not the dark of the night, which in Chișinău in March is a cold dark but a known one. The dark of the building. The dark of the corridors, the stairways, the elevator. The dark of appliances stopping. The dark of silence, because when the electricity goes the building loses all the sounds you did not know you were hearing: the refrigerator, the heating fan, the oven clock blinking.

Damari turned on the phone flashlight. The battery showed sixty-one per cent. She opened the notebook she kept in the guard booth, the notebook of things to know, which was not an official document but a ruled notebook where Damari wrote the things that were needed to do her job and that nobody had taught her.

Page one: emergency numbers. Page two: where the fire extinguishers are. Page three: who has the keys to what. Page four: the things that run on electricity and cannot stop.

Page four had three lines. The water pump in the basement. The automatic gate of the garage. And the oxygen concentrator of apartment 12, third floor, Mrs. Cebotari.

Mrs. Cebotari was seventy-two years old and had a lung disease that Damari could not pronounce. The concentrator was a machine that took the air from the room and filtered it and returned a version with more oxygen, and Mrs. Cebotari breathed it through a plastic tube that entered her nose, and the machine ran on electricity, and without electricity the machine turned off, and without the machine Mrs. Cebotari breathed the room air, which for her was not enough.

Damari knew these things because she had asked.

The building had an emergency generator in the courtyard, next to the transformer. The generator was supposed to start on its own when the grid went down. Damari heard the generator trying to start: one stroke, two strokes, three strokes. The engine turned but did not catch.

She went out to the courtyard. The generator was a dark green block with a grille and a control panel and a smell of old diesel. The panel showed a red light. Damari did not know what the red light meant, but in the notebook, page six, it said: «If the red light stays on: the generator does not start. Call the technician. Number: _______». The number had been erased by a coffee stain.

Damari looked at the phone. Two twenty-two. Mrs. Cebotari had a portable oxygen tank for emergencies. Damari knew this because she had asked the son three months earlier, during the first blackout, which had lasted forty minutes. The son had said: «The tank lasts two hours. Maybe three. Depends on how much she breathes.»

Two hours. Maybe three.

«Damari.»

She turned. Mr. Pleșca from the first floor was at the door with a candle.

«It went out?»

«The whole area. Not just the building.»

«The generator?»

«Won't start. The red light.»

«And how long will it last?»

«I don't know.»

Pleșca looked at the courtyard. The dark of the city was different from the dark of the building: it was a wide dark, without edges, that reached the rooftops and erased them.

«I don't need anything,» Pleșca said. «But the lady on the third floor.»

«I know.»

«She has the machine.»

«I know.»

Damari went up to the third floor. She knocked at apartment 12. Mrs. Cebotari's voice came from inside, thin.

«Who is it?»

«Damari. The guard.»

«The power went out.»

«I know, ma'am. Do you have the tank?»

«My son put it under the bed. But I don't know how to open it.»

Damari went in. The room had the smell of rooms where someone breathes with difficulty: a warm, still smell that does not circulate. The phone flashlight lit Mrs. Cebotari sitting on the bed with the tube in her nose that was no longer blowing. Under the bed was the green tank with the valve on top and the pressure reducer and the transparent tube wrapped with a rubber band.

Damari had never opened an oxygen tank. But in the notebook, page eight, it said: «Oxygen tank apt. 12: unscrew the valve by hand, counterclockwise. No tools needed. The flow is adjusted with the small wheel. The lady uses 2 liters per minute.»

She unscrewed the valve. The oxygen began to come out with a light hiss. She connected the tube. Mrs. Cebotari breathed.

«How long will it last?» the lady asked.

«A few hours. Don't worry.»

Damari did not know how long the dark would last. Two thirty-seven. The tank lasted two hours, maybe three. The grid could come back in an hour or in a day. The Isaccea-Vulcănești line was a name Damari did not know, a point on a map she had never seen, a cable connecting one country to another that someone had hit twelve hundred kilometers from that bed.

She sat on the chair by the door. The hiss of the tank was the only sound in the apartment. Mrs. Cebotari closed her eyes. Damari looked at the phone. Fifty-four per cent.

The power would come back or it would not. The generator would not start. The technician was not answering. The tank had a finite content that was emptying at two liters per minute. Damari could do nothing about any of these things. She could stay in the chair and wait. And count, every now and then, Mrs. Cebotari's breaths, to know how many liters were leaving the tank.

I worked as a night guard for two winters in a nine-story building. Nobody explains what to do when the power goes out. You figure it out yourself, at night, when it happens. You learn where things are. You learn who needs what. You learn that the building at night is an organism and you are the only one who knows where its heart beats. When the dark comes, the dark is not the problem. The problem is knowing that on the third floor someone breathes with a machine that has turned off, and that the tank under the bed has a number of hours you do not know, and that number is the only thing that counts.

Four hundred Russian drones hit the Isaccea-Vulcănești power line that feeds Moldova. Forty energy infrastructures damaged in one night. Blackout across the entire country. Moldova imports electricity from Romania through a cable. March 25, 2026.

Everyday 007 — Il ritardo

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Her hands were on the table, palms down, the way she placed them every morning on the kitchen counter before deciding whether this was a day when her hands would work or not, because since Amala had quit, and quitting was not the right word but it was the one she used with her partner and with the doctor and with anyone who asked what she did now and she would answer 'I quit' as if she had quit smoking, without specifying that for eight hours a day from the laptop in her room she had looked at images of violence that a company loaded onto her screen and had decided which were violent enough to be removed and which were not, since she had quit her hands had become the first thing to check, every morning, the temperature of the knuckles, the sensitivity of the fingertips, the ability to open and close the fist without the gesture feeling like the gesture of someone else, and if the hands responded then the day could begin, and if the hands did not respond, if there was that delay between the command and the execution that the doctor called 'somatic dissociation' and that Amala called the delay, then the day began anyway but from a lower step, from a point where every object touched would require an act of 'verification' before being truly felt, 'is it me touching the cup or is the cup being touched,' and the difference, for someone who has not experienced it, is nonexistent, and for Amala it was everything.

The 'training' had lasted three weeks, and in those three weeks Amala had learned the 'categories,' fourteen main and forty-two subcategories, each with an alphanumeric code and a colour in the interface and a description in English that explained what she was supposed to look for, and inside the categories there was a vocabulary that had never been her vocabulary, 'explicit content,' 'violent content,' 'escalation,' 'priority flagging,' 'level four material,' words that had deposited in her head the way limescale deposits in a pipe, layer after layer, without anyone deciding it, until the pipe is no longer the pipe but the limescale, and now, a year later, the 'categories' were still there, inside the structure with which Amala looked at the world, because the problem was not what she had seen, it was not the images themselves, 'oh if only it were just that,' the eight hundred a day for six months that made one hundred and forty-four thousand images in total that one night she had calculated because numbers when you put them in a column become a fact and not a memory and facts can be endured, the problem was that looking at the images had taught her to 'classify' and classifying had become the way her hands touched things and the way her eyes read a face and the way her skin registered contact before the contact became sensation, every contact passed through the filter of the fourteen categories as if the body had installed a 'verification protocol' between the world and perception, 'is this safe,' 'is this appropriate,' 'does this fall within parameters,' and the protocol could not be uninstalled, the doctor said it would take time and had prescribed exercises that consisted of touching different surfaces, wood, fabric, metal, water, and saying aloud what she felt, but Amala did the exercises and what she felt was the category before the surface, like a subtitle that appears on the film before the scene, and the hands that touched wood touched the code for wood first, and the hands that touched fabric searched first in the taxonomy whether fabric was 'content' or 'context,' because in the 'training' they had taught her the difference between the content to be classified and the context that surrounds the content, and the difference had remained in her hands like a reflex that responds not to the will but to the muscle.

Her partner touched her shoulder. The hand was warm, Amala knew it as a fact, knew it the way she knew that water boils at one hundred degrees and that her contract had expired in August, but between the knowing and the feeling there was the delay, that second, perhaps less than a second, in which the hand on the shoulder was not yet a hand on a shoulder but was a 'contact' to be 'classified,' and Amala felt the trapezius muscle contract, not from fear and not from pain, from 'categorization,' the body responding to the hand the way it had responded to an image on the screen, first the category then the sensation, first the code then the warmth, and in that second Amala knew, with the cold clarity of someone looking at an X-ray and seeing the shadow that should not be there, that the damage was not in the one hundred and forty-four thousand images she had seen but in the way seeing them had taught her to feel, 'how much breath have you got left,' she thought, 'how much breath have you got left if every time someone touches you the first thing you do is decide whether the touch is permitted before feeling it,' and her partner withdrew the hand, not because he had felt the contraction of the muscle, or perhaps yes, but because Amala's silence after being touched had become a response that her partner had learned to read without asking, because asking produced the vocabulary and the vocabulary produced the 'categories' and the categories produced the delay and the delay produced a larger silence.

Amala stood up. She went to the kitchen. She opened the tap and put her hands under the water. The water was cold, colder than it should have been at that hour of the day, and her hands felt it with a delay that this time was longer, three seconds perhaps four, in which her hands were under the water and the water was not there, in which her hands were matter under a stream that did not reach them, and then the cold arrived, arrived all at once the way sound arrives after lightning, and the hands responded, and Amala kept them there, under the stream, without moving them, waiting for the cold to become pain and the pain to become sensation and the sensation to become something that did not need to be 'classified' to exist.

Women from rural communities in India work as content moderators for global technology companies. They look at up to eight hundred images of violence a day, from a home laptop, for two hundred pounds a month. The Guardian, February 5, 2026.

Everyday 006 — La vacca usa la scopa

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dr. Marin parked in the courtyard at eight twelve. The Panda diesel engine kept knocking for three seconds after she pulled out the key, as it had since November, and she sat waiting for it to stop, because turning off the engine and hearing it still run gave her a feeling of disorder she could not tolerate. She took the folder from the back seat, checked the file number, verified the pen was clipped to the metal tab. The farm was one of fourteen on the March circuit, the third of the week, organic, thirty-two head declared. The courtyard had fresh gravel, the manure had been moved recently, the silage silo had its cover closed and fastened with a steel cable. Two cats sat on the washstand wall, one tabby and one white, both with intact ears. The air had a smell of cut hay and iron, and behind the hay there was something sweeter, almost organic, which Dr. Marin catalogued without thinking as colostrum even though the season was not right.

The owner was waiting at the stable door wearing a padded vest and washed rubber boots. A man with broad hands and a face tanned to mid-forehead, where the hat protected it. He said everything was fine, the calves from the last birth had gained weight, the vet had come in February for prophylaxis. Dr. Marin nodded and began the round. She checked the stalls one by one, the troughs, the automatic drinkers, the ventilation angle, the floor grates. She noted on the folder: average body condition 3.2, no evident lameness, bedding in good condition, no signs of heat stress. They were at the sixth stall when the owner stopped in front of a brown cow, large, with a grey muzzle and watery eyes. She was thirteen years old, he said. A Brown Swiss. Then he added something Dr. Marin did not expect. He said the cow used a broom. Not just any broom, he specified, looking at her as if searching for a sign of disbelief. A broom with bristles on one end and a smooth handle on the other. And the cow chose which end to use. The bristles for her back, where the hair was coarser and the skin less sensitive. The smooth handle for her muzzle, behind her ears, for the spots where the skin was thin. She had been doing it for at least two years. At first they thought she was playing. Then they understood she was not playing. Dr. Marin looked at the cow. The cow was chewing with half-closed eyes, her jaw rotating slowly to the left. Beside her, leaning against the stall wall, was a sorghum broom with a light wooden handle, worn at mid-height, where the surface had become smooth and dark from use. The folder was resting on the stall fence. Dr. Marin did not remember setting it down.

The owner called the cow by name. The cow raised her head, approached the broom, pushed it with her muzzle until it fell on its side. Then she turned it. With her upper lip, with a slow and calibrated movement that Dr. Marin could not have described with any term from her professional vocabulary, she rotated the handle until the bristles faced down. She rubbed her back against the bristles, shifting her weight from one hind leg to the other, and the pressure was controlled, measured, as if she knew exactly how much force was needed. After a few seconds she stopped, turned the broom again with the same muzzle gesture, and passed the smooth handle behind her left ear, tilting her head to the side. The wood slid over the thin skin and the cow closed her eyes. Dr. Marin had filled out animal welfare forms for twenty years, three thousand and some, all with the same behaviour section: three boxes, normal, stereotyped, apathetic. She knew stereotyped behaviours, the swaying, the bar biting, the compulsive licking of the trough. She knew apathy, the cow standing still with lowered head that does not react to contact. What the cow did with the broom had no box. Dr. Marin looked at her own hands. They were empty. She thought of a stable she had inspected six years before, in another valley, in winter, with snow on the roofs and steam coming from the animals’ nostrils. A younger cow, a branch fallen inside the enclosure after a windstorm. The cow was doing something with the branch that Dr. Marin had not been able to classify. She moved it against the gate post, repositioned it, used it again, and the gesture had a precision that did not belong to the repertoire of normal, stereotyped, or apathetic behaviours. Dr. Marin had looked at the form. Animal welfare, behaviour section: three boxes. Normal. Stereotyped. Apathetic. None of the three. She had marked normal, because normal was the option closest to what she could not name. She had moved on to the next stall. She had forgotten the scene for six years, until the brown cow turned the broom with her muzzle and Dr. Marin felt something move in her stomach, not nausea, something older, the weight of an error she had not known she had committed.

Dr. Marin picked up the folder from the fence. The pen was still clipped to the metal tab. She completed the form. Thirty-two head, all in good condition. No health anomalies. No non-conformities. No observations. She signed at the bottom right, detached the copy for the farm, handed the sheet to the owner who took it without looking at it. She thanked him, crossed the courtyard. The two cats were still on the wall, in the same position. The silo still had its cover closed. She got in the car, placed the folder on the passenger seat, printed side facing down. From the stable window, the sorghum broom was still visible, leaning against the stall wall, with the bristles facing up.

A thirteen-year-old cow on an organic alpine farm uses the two ends of a broom to scratch different parts of her body: the bristles for her back, the smooth handle for behind her ears. First documented case of flexible tool use in a bovine. Published in Current Biology, March 26, 2026.

Everyday 005 — La scorta

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Montero opened the sack at six in the morning as he had opened every sack for twenty-seven days, with the knife he kept hanging on the hook above the sink, the knife with the black handle he had brought from the previous ship and from the ship before that, because a ship’s cook changes ships but not knives. The sack was the last one. Inside there were about four kilos of rice, which was the right amount for fifteen people’s lunch if the rice was a side dish, and for eight if the rice was the main course, and Montero had been making rice as the main course for eleven days because the chicken had run out on the sixteenth day and the frozen beef on the nineteenth and the fish on the twenty-first, and the rice had stayed because rice is always the last thing to run out on a ship, like water is the last thing to run out in a desert.

The strait was closed. The ship had not moved for twenty-seven days.

The cargo manifest said fourteen days. Fourteen days of navigation, fourteen days of provisions, fourteen days of fuel for the kitchen and the generators and the air conditioning, because a tanker anchored in the Gulf in March without air conditioning becomes an oven in three hours, and Montero knew this because the air conditioning had broken on the ninth day and they had repaired it on the tenth, and in those twenty-four hours the kitchen had reached forty-eight degrees and the rice was boiling before you even put it in the water, ‘boiling on its own’ as Vargas the engineer had said, and Vargas was someone who exaggerated about everything except temperature.

The provisions had been calculated with a twenty percent margin, which meant two and a half extra days, which meant sixteen and a half days, which meant that from the seventeenth day Montero was rationing. Rationing on a ship is not like rationing on land, because on land you can buy and on a ship you can only use less, and using less means smaller portions, and smaller portions on a ship where no one works and everyone waits means that food becomes the only thing that marks the day, and the only thing that marks the day is the only thing that diminishes.

«Montero.»

«Tell me.»

«How many days?»

«With what’s left, today.»

«One day.»

Vargas stayed in the doorway of the kitchen. Montero poured the rice into the water. Four kilos. Fifteen portions. The last time.

The deck was empty at that hour. The other ships were all visible, a line of dark points in the clear Gulf water, and every point was a ship and every ship had a kitchen and every kitchen had a cook counting the sacks. Montero knew this because he spoke by radio with three other cooks — Petersen from the Stavanger, Liu from the Jade Fortune, Karim from the Al-Shifa — and all three had run out of something: Petersen the potatoes, Liu the soy sauce, Karim the bread, and all three were rationing, and none of the three knew when the strait would reopen because knowing was not part of a cook’s duties, a cook’s duties were to feed fifteen people three times a day, and Montero did that.

The rice boiled for twelve minutes. Montero drained it. He divided it into fifteen equal plates, counting with the ladle, four ladles per plate, as he had done every day, as he would have done tomorrow with something else if there had been something else, but there was nothing else, there were onions and there was salt and there was water from the desalinator, and tomorrow lunch would be onions with water and salt, which is a soup if you call it a soup and which is hunger if you call it by its name.

«Montero.»

«Tell me.»

«How long do the onions last?»

«Three days. Four if I cut them thin.»

«And after?»

Montero did not answer. After was not a question for a cook. After was a question for whoever decided when the strait reopened, and whoever decided did not eat onions.

I know these things. I did eighteen months on a cargo ship, not in the Gulf, in the Pacific, but the kitchen is the same. When provisions run out nothing happens as an event, a silence happens: the cook says nothing, the crew asks nothing, and everyone counts the same number without saying it. I have seen cooks rationing without the captain ordering it, because a cook counts the days better than a captain, and a cook’s days are counted in kilos.

Two thousand ships stopped at the Strait of Hormuz, twenty-seven days of blockade. Iran decides who passes. Ship provisions were calculated for fourteen days.

Everyday 004 — Lo screening

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The van had arrived at seven in the morning in the mine’s parking lot, a white van with the blue writing of the federal health service on the side, and Harlan had seen it from the night shift while coming up from the shaft with the others, the dust still in his throat, his hands trembling with the cold of the March air after eight hours of compressed air six hundred meters below road level, and he had thought, without formulating the thought as a thought but letting it pass the way you let pass a truck coming from the other direction, that the van was there for him, in the sense that it was there for all of them but especially for those like him who had twenty-three years of dust in their lungs and who knew, because they all knew even though nobody said it with the words the van would use, that the lungs at some point stop doing what they are made for.

He got in line.

The line was eleven people, all in work overalls, all with their helmets under their arms, and Harlan was sixth, which meant he would wait about forty minutes, because each “screening,” as they called it in the flyer posted in the cafeteria, lasted between five and eight minutes and included, again according to the flyer, a “work history questionnaire,” a “chest X-ray,” a “blood pressure check,” and a “spirometry,” which was a word Harlan had never heard before that flyer and which meant blowing into a tube connected to a machine that measured how much air the lungs were able to move, which was, if he thought about it, “rather ironic,” because air was exactly the thing that the lungs of a coal miner stopped moving after twenty years of breathing dust that was not air.

The fifth in line entered the van.

Harlan looked at the parking lot. It was a gravel parking lot with faded white lines and the miners’ pickups parked in crooked rows, because nobody parked straight at seven in the morning after a night shift, and behind the parking lot there was the mountain, which was not a real mountain but the spoil heap from the mine, the thing the company called a “temporary storage area” and which had been there for thirty-six years, six stories tall, black, with edges that crumbled when it rained.

‘Harlan.’

The doctor was at the van’s door. Young. Thirty, maybe less.

‘Come in.’

Inside the van there was a chair, a portable X-ray machine, a blood pressure monitor attached to the wall, and the spirometer, which was a white plastic tube connected to a small grey box with a screen showing numbers. The doctor asked how many years he had worked in the mine, and Harlan said twenty-three, and the doctor wrote the number on a form without comment, and asked if he coughed, and Harlan said ‘yes but everyone coughs,’ and the doctor wrote that down too.

The X-ray took a few seconds. The doctor looked at the screen.

‘Breathe normally.’

The spirometry required Harlan to blow into the tube as hard as possible, holding the breath and then releasing all the air in one go, and Harlan blew, and the number that appeared on the screen was a number the doctor looked at without changing expression, because the doctors of federal mobile health service vans do not change expression when they look at numbers, whether the number is good or is the one Harlan knew it would be, because Harlan knew, as they all knew in the line, that at some point the number goes down, the way the level in a tank goes down when nobody fills it, and the number that had appeared on the screen was the number of a tank that nobody had filled for twenty-three years.

‘We’ll send the results to your home.’

Harlan went out from the van. The sixth in line after him was already standing, ready to go in.

The March air had a smell of wet earth and diesel from the pickups and something that came from the black mountain of spoil, a smell Harlan knew the way you know the smell of your own house, a smell you no longer notice unless someone points it out to you, and nobody pointed it out to him because everyone smelled the same smell and nobody smelled it. The cough came while he was walking toward the pickup, not the cold cough but the other one, the one that was inside somewhere between the throat and the place where the lungs end, the one the doctor would call “productive” in the report and which Harlan called, when he called it anything, “the usual.”

The white van would remain in the parking lot until five in the afternoon. The next shift would come up from the shaft and get in line. The doctor would ask how many years, and would write the number, and the spirometer would measure how much air, and the number would appear on the screen, and the doctor would not change expression.

Harlan’s pickup did not start on the first try. It started on the second.

The federal health service carries out free screenings for lung disease in coal miners. Mobile van, spirometer, X-ray. Two years since the collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore, the bridge has not been rebuilt.

Everyday 003 — Il feed

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ferro found his daughter’s phone on the kitchen table at ten twenty in the evening and did not touch it. He did not touch it because that was the deal: I don’t look and you tell me if there’s something making you feel bad. Three years the deal had held, or at least three years since Clara had said anything, and the silence of a fourteen-year-old Ferro read as a good sign, because he had no other signs to read.

The screen was on. The feed scrolled on its own.

A girl putting on makeup. Twelve seconds. Another girl showing what she’d bought. Twelve seconds. A boy saying what he thought about girls. Twelve seconds. A girl crying over a comment. Twelve seconds. Another. Another. Another.

Ferro watched for three minutes without touching the screen. It wasn’t the content that stopped him. It was the sequence. Each video was slightly more intense than the one before, and the difference was so small you couldn’t see it, like a ramp that rises half a centimeter at a time and you only realize you’re high up when you look down. And Ferro was looking down.

None of those videos were illegal. None were violent. None were anything a parent fears finding. They were normal videos, normal people, rooms with the same light, voices with the same tone, faces that changed but the rhythm didn’t, twelve seconds and pause, twelve and pause, and the rhythm was what kept you, not the faces. The machine knew what to show. It didn’t know who it was showing it to. It didn’t care. Clara’s phone had thirteen months of feed. Thirteen months of twelve seconds at a time. Ferro didn’t know how many hours that was, because he wasn’t the type who did that kind of math, but he knew that his daughter went to bed at eleven and that the light under the door stayed on until he went to check, and when he checked Clara would kill the screen and say she was sleeping.

Clara came back from the bathroom with her face washed and the eyes of someone who is sleepy but doesn’t know it. The sleep of fourteen comes late, since the phone moved into the room.

«Dad. My phone.»

«What do you watch, in the evenings?»

«Videos. Nothing.»

«Does everyone?»

«Everyone.»

Clara took the phone and the screen went dark under her fingers, the gesture of someone closing something they don’t want to show, and the gesture was quick, automatic, fingers that knew where to press without looking, and Ferro thought that his daughter’s fingers knew that phone better than his own hands knew any tool of his trade. The bedroom door closed behind her. Ferro stayed in the kitchen with the empty table and the rectangle of light in his retinas, that rectangle that stays when you close your eyes after staring at a lamp.

The next day he read the news. A provincial court had ordered the platform to pay three hundred seventy-five million. Thousands of violations. Five thousand dollars each. The first verdict. The state had won.

Ferro did the math. He did it twice because the first time he didn’t believe it. Three hundred seventy-five million: zero point three percent of the platform’s annual revenue. Less than one day’s earnings. The figure that was supposed to punish was a figure the platform made between morning and lunch. The harm the court had measured was a number and the number had a scale and the scale was small, so small that Ferro understood the number wasn’t meant to punish, it was meant to close the case. The harm Ferro had seen on the table had no scale. It was twelve seconds at a time, every evening, in his daughter’s room, and nobody called it harm because the harm was in the order, not the content, and the order doesn’t show.

The deal said: tell me if there’s something making you feel bad. But feel bad wasn’t the right phrase. Clara didn’t feel bad. She watched normal videos put in sequence by a machine that never slept and never judged and never protected and didn’t know that Clara was fourteen. The machine only knew that Clara stayed. And Clara stayed.

Ferro turned off the kitchen light. The hallway was dark. Under Clara’s door, the blue strip of light from the screen. Twelve seconds. Pause. Twelve seconds. Pause.

A provincial court orders the platform to pay three hundred seventy-five million dollars for harm caused to minors through its algorithms. First jury verdict. Five thousand dollars per violation.

Everyday 002 — Lo script

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marra put on her headset at seven-thirty and the first toll-free call of the day came in at seven-thirty-one. A woman from Arezzo who wanted to know why the February bill was higher than January’s. Marra opened the customer file, looked at the consumption, looked at the rate, and answered in the voice she always used, a voice calm and clear and slightly slower than the one she used outside the office, because the quality manual said that clients perceive competence from the speed of the voice and trust from its steadiness.

«The bill reflects the actual consumption for the two-month period, ma’am. Consumption in January and February was higher than the estimate.»

«Higher by how much?»

«Twenty-three percent. It may be related to the outside temperature.»

«And the next one?»

«The next bill will be calculated on the consumption for the March-April period.»

The woman from Arezzo thanked her and hung up. Marra closed the file. The toll-free display showed fourteen calls waiting. Marra pressed the button and the next voice entered the headset.

She had worked in the gas company’s customer service for six years, on the seven-thirty shift, which was the shift nobody wanted because early-morning clients were the angriest, the ones who had opened the envelope the night before and hadn’t slept, and Marra took them all, one after another, with the same voice, the same patience, the same phrases the manual called “standard responses” and which Marra knew the way you know prayers, that is, without thinking about the meaning of the words.

Standard response number seven: «The price of natural gas is determined by the Regulatory Authority for Energy, Networks and Environment based on procurement costs.»

Standard response number twelve: «We are unable to provide forecasts on future rates.»

Standard response number three: «You can consult the details of your consumption in the customer area of the website.»

The responses were on a laminated sheet next to the monitor. Marra no longer read them. She said them the way you say good morning, the way you say thank you, the way you say goodbye, which were the other three things the manual prescribed: one at the start, one when the client accepts the response, one at the end.

The memo had arrived the day before. Internal communication, not for clients. Subject: update on rate projections Q4 2026. The main supplier had declared force majeure on long-term contracts. Two liquefaction plants damaged. Estimated repairs: three to five years. Projected impact on consumer rates: an increase of between thirty-five and forty-five percent starting in the fourth quarter. The memo also said: «Please do not share this information with clients until the Authority’s official communication.»

Marra had read the memo, folded it, placed it in the drawer under the laminated sheets of standard responses. The memo was not a standard response. It had no number. It was not on the sheet. It was in the drawer, which was the place for things that exist but are not said.

«Listen, miss.»

«Go ahead.»

«I live alone. The pension is what it is. Gas in winter costs me more than rent. I wanted to ask something.»

«Go ahead.»

«Will I pay more next winter?»

Marra looked at the monitor. The client’s file. Seventy-eight years old. Annual consumption: twelve hundred cubic meters. Current rate. Projection with the forty percent increase: one hundred and twenty-eight euros more per month, from October to March.

«We are unable to provide forecasts on future rates.»

«Yes, but what do you think?»

Marra looked at the drawer. The memo was there, folded in four. The number the client was asking for was in the memo. The memo said not to tell him. The script said not to tell him. The quality manual said the client deserves a clear answer and the clearest answer Marra had was a number she could not say.

«I recommend consulting the Authority’s website for updates on rates.»

«I don’t know how to use the website.»

«I can help you register, if you’d like.»

«No, thank you, miss. Have a good day.»

«Have a good day.»

Marra closed the call. The display showed twenty-two waiting. She pressed the button. The next voice entered.

The seventy-eight-year-old man would turn on the thermostat in October, as every year, and the click would be the same click, and the boiler would ignite, and the gas would arrive, and the radiator would heat, and the bill would arrive in December with a number the man did not expect, and the man would call the toll-free number and a calm clear voice would tell him that the price of natural gas is determined by the Authority based on procurement costs, and that voice would be distance made sentence, the distance between a destroyed plant in the Gulf and a radiator in a pensioner’s apartment, a man who lives alone, and the distance would have the tone of courtesy and the rhythm of a standard response.

I worked in call centers. Not for gas, for insurance, but the mechanics are the same. The laminated sheet, the numbered responses, the voice you have to keep steady even when you know the answer is a lie by omission. The client asks and you answer with what you can say, and what you cannot say stays in the drawer, and the drawer is always closed, and the key is the contract you signed. I learned one thing, in those two years: courtesy is the most efficient form of distance. You smile, and the distance grows. The voice is calm, and the consequence recedes. The caller doesn’t know. The answerer knows and doesn’t say. And between the two, the bill.

QatarEnergy declares force majeure on liquefied gas contracts. Two liquefaction trains out of fourteen offline at Ras Laffan. Repairs: three to five years.

Everyday 001 — Il punto sei

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The bristles of the industrial brush touched the concrete of runway three and the sound was that of an animal scraping the bottom of an empty bowl. Tom Ferrante was on his knees at the center of the closed runway, with the solvent bucket on his left and the task register on his right, open to the page for passage eleven.

The mark was as long as a man lying down and as wide as a step. It had the color of things that burn when they should not burn.

Ferrante applied the solvent with the circular movement the procedure required, from the outer edge toward the center, counting the passes as he had always done, on every runway where he had worked, and he had counted thousands of passes, on concrete that had absorbed everything, before moving on to the next point.

Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.

Dawson came from the fence with the walk of a man in no hurry.

«You don’t want the machine?»

«The machine is for large surfaces. This is passage eleven.»

«Always with the passages.»

«The passages exist for a reason.»

Dawson shrugged and went back to the van. Ferrante went back to the mark. The solvent had a smell that stung the eyes. He knew it the way you know the taste of your own saliva, because in twenty-one years of runways he had never used a different solvent and his hands had never made a different gesture.

The concrete of that runway had a grain that absorbed things and made them its own. Oil, rubber, kerosene, fluids that the manual catalogued as organic residues. After a while the mark was no longer a mark: it was the runway. Ferrante knew this. That was why he counted.

Dawson came back with two coffees in plastic cups. He set one on the edge of the bucket.

«If it spills it’s your fault» said Ferrante without looking up.

«If it spills that’s another passage. Works in your favor.»

Ferrante almost smiled. He took a sip. The coffee tasted of plastic and automatic machine, which is the same taste in every airport in the world.

The wind carried the smell of kerosene from the part of the runway where no one had cleaned yet. The air changed. The blue runway edge lights were still on in the daylight. No one had turned them off because turning them off was a passage that came later, and Ferrante had not yet reached that passage. The radio at his belt crackled a dirty signal. Ferrante ignored it. The radio was not in the register, and what was not in the register did not exist.

Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.

The mark would not come off.

Ferrante stopped. The manual said that in case of residue resistance you returned to passage nine, the water jet. Ferrante leafed back through the register and his fingers stopped on the adjacent page. It was not his page. It was the emergency vehicle positioning procedure.

Point six: place the fire vehicle forty-two meters from the runway threshold, centered on the axis, oriented in the direction of the prevailing wind.

The distance was written. The position was written. The direction was written.

Ferrante looked at the page. Then at the mark. Then at the page again.

Someone had taken that point six and executed it with the same precision with which Ferrante executed his passage eleven, with the same faith that written instructions produce the expected result, and the expected result was a rescue vehicle stopped exactly at the point where the plane was about to touch the ground.

«Dawson.»

«What?»

«Come here.»

Dawson came over. Ferrante showed him the page. Point six. The distance. The position. Then he pointed at the mark on the concrete.

«It’s the procedure» said Dawson.

«It’s the procedure.»

«So who made the mistake?»

«Two pilots» said Dawson. «They said so on the radio.»

Ferrante looked at the mark on the concrete. One mark. Not two. Not pilots. A mark as long as a man and as wide as a step, and passage eleven does not ask how many there were.

He closed the register. Picked up the brush.

Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six.

The brush moved over the concrete and the mark stayed and the solvent dried at the edges and the wind carried the smell of kerosene in the silence of a runway where nothing lands.

I know these things. Where I worked there was a form for everything: the form for inspections, the form for compliance, the form for faults that were not faults. And everyone signed their form and went home, because the form was signed. When the procedure is followed and the result is a dead person, who made the mistake? No one. The dead person pays, and the dead do not sign forms.

A regional aircraft struck a fire vehicle on the LaGuardia runway. Two pilots dead.