The Blank Page
The cursor blinks. That's it. That's the whole show.
Alex watches it pulse against the white glare of the screen — on, off, on, off — like some tiny, patient heartbeat mocking the stillness around it. Outside the window, the city hums with its usual disregard: a delivery truck grinding its gears, someone's radio bleeding out a half-familiar pop song, pigeons arguing over territory on the fire escape. Inside, there is only this: a laptop, a chair that creaks in one specific spot no matter how Alex shifts, and a document titled *Untitled 14* that has held exactly zero words for the past forty minutes.
The apartment is small enough that everything feels like evidence. A pyramid of crumpled paper sits beside the wastebasket, having missed its intended target by a solid two feet each time. Sticky notes curl at the edges on the corkboard above the desk, their ink faded from sun and time, remnants of ideas that once seemed luminous — *what if the house remembers the family instead of the other way around* — and now just look like the handwriting of a stranger who believed in something.
Alex reaches for the coffee mug, finds it empty except for a cold, bitter film at the bottom, and…