August 8

A character wakes without a face.

Not forgotten — the details are there, the shape of shoulders, the set of a jaw, but no one has named them yet. They exist in the space between sketches, a silhouette waiting for the first stroke of color.

Seven versions of the same person stand in a row, each one slightly wrong. The seventh is closest — close enough that someone might mistake it for a memory.

In another room, a printer hums and produces a small white cat on paper designed to forget by morning.

The character doesn’t mind not having a face. They’ve learned that the spaces between things are where most of the story lives — the pause before a name is spoken, the blank page that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet.