Wonder State
Dom has been measuring the oak for three years.
Not building. Measuring. The platform, the angle of the boards, the ladder versus the rope, the version of himself who finishes the things he starts.
Three hours and thirty-five minutes away, a stream runs under a tree with a forked trunk that looks like it has been waiting to hold something between its branches.
Every morning at 6:15, the agent sends its digest. Properties. Lenders. Meal plans. School forms. Answers to questions no one has asked yet. The work moves forward whether Dom does or not.
His daughter draws the treehouse in crayon. His son designs the room beneath it. His wife closes a deal he doesn't remember her mentioning.
A deposit is placed. A college application arrives, complete, before anyone has decided. A wrench goes missing from the foam.
Dom stands in his kitchen at six forty-one in the morning, alone, listening to a machine do its slow reliable work, and feels something close to peace.
Then the house wakes up.
Tuesday.
The third alarm.
Dom had a relationship with the third alarm he’d never examined too closely. The first was optimistic. The second was negotiation. The third was the truth — the version of himself that actually existed, instead of the one he’d planned on being the night before when he set the first alarm at six.
Six. As if.
He lay there for a moment in the darkness of early morning, that narrow corridor between sleep and Tuesday, and did what he always did. Checked the watch. Not the time — he didn’t care about the time. The sleep score. Seventy-three. The watch had already sent it — to the agent, to his insurer, to whatever integration he’d approved sometime last spring in a yes he couldn’t locate in his memory. Not bad for someone who’d been down the rabbit hole until past midnight. He’d read somewhere shorter sleep could run deeper.
He moved through the hall without turning on lights. He knew this house in the dark the way you know something you’ve stopped seeing — by memory, by muscle, by the specific creak of the third stair he always stepped over without thinking.
The kitchen announced itself before he entered it.
Trash. Faint but present. And underneath that, dog food — someone had left the bag open again — and beneath that, already beginning its gentle takeover, the coffee maker doing its slow, reliable work. By the time he reached the counter, the coffee had won. It always won. That was one of the things Dom counted on.
He stood at the counter while it finished. Not doing anything. Not scrolling. Just standing in his kitchen at — he looked now — 6:41 in the morning, listening to the machine do what machines do without complaint or complication.
The speaker came on. He’d set it the night before, the way he always did. A voice filled the room. Measured, professional, arriving mid-sentence about something in the Midwest. Dom didn’t catch it. Didn’t need to. The content was almost beside the point. What mattered was the voice itself.
He poured the coffee. Just enough cream to take the edge off. Not enough to change what it was.
Daily Digest: Baseline established. Temp: 180°F. Optimal. Syncing calendar.
The kitchen looked the way it always looked. Which is to say — lived in. There was a pile on the counter in the corner where a telephone used to live twenty years ago in some other family’s version of this house. Nobody had telephones in kitchens anymore, but somehow the spot had retained its purpose, accumulating instead a rotating archaeology of their life — drawings in crayon, a permission slip that may or may not have been returned, a fossil Mia had found in the backyard and carried inside the way she carried things she understood mattered. It was never completely clear. It was shockingly noticeable when it was.
The third alarm was the truth.
Dom goes under. The world works better, but he feels worse. The agent enters as relief, then becomes something else entirely.
The rest of it is hers.
The agent gets a body. The family begins drawing lines. Something is being pulled too close to the machine.
The first one went in slightly off. Not crooked. Not perfect. It held.
A negotiated peace. A conscious choice about which parts to protect.
The antagonist doesn't argue.
It just performs better.
A novel about the version of yourself
a machine can almost reach.
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WONDER STATE
You’re holding a manuscript still in motion. This is the most current version. Read it knowing it will be different in print — and that difference is the point.
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