The mark was still there.
Not on the skin.
On the table.
A photograph.
I had seen it before.
Or so I thought.
The image showed my back facing the lime-covered wall.
The same light.
The same distance.
The same waiting.
The strange thing was that there was no sign of impact.
No mark.
No trace.
Nothing.
I turned it over.
There was a sentence written on the back.
In my handwriting.
“This was taken afterward.”
After what, it did not say.
I opened the drawer.
Inside I found a folder I did not remember.
Its name was simple.
Record.
There were sixteen photographs.
I examined them one by one.
Every image showed the same room.
The same position.
The same framing.
But each photograph contained a tiny difference.
In some, the chair stood closer to the wall.
In others, farther away.
In one image, a crack was missing—a crack that now ran from floor to ceiling.
An immediate unease settled in.
Not because of the images.
Because of the dates.
The dates moved forward correctly.
The cracks did not.
A photograph taken months later showed a wall less damaged than an earlier one.
I searched for an explanation.
I found none.
When I reached the final image, I discovered something worse.
A note was attached to the wall.
I did not remember ever seeing it.
I zoomed in.
The sentence was short.
“This time it left a mark.”
I looked again.
The back remained untouched.
No sign.
No wound.
Nothing.
Yet now there was something else.
A shadow.
Directly behind me.
It did not look like a person.
It looked like an absence shaped like one.
I opened another folder.
I did not remember creating it.
Inside was a single screenshot.
It showed the gallery I was looking at in that exact moment.
It took several seconds to understand.
The screenshot had been captured before I opened the folder.
Below it was a note.
“Don’t look for the mark on the skin.”
I kept reading.
“Look for it in what you forgot.”
The room seemed to shrink.
For the first time I had the feeling that something was answering.
Not watching.
Answering.
I reviewed the messages.
The notes.
The dates.
The folders.
Then I found something unexpected.
An audio recording.
Seven seconds long.
I played it.
Only breathing could be heard.
Then a voice.
My voice.
Saying a single sentence.
“It wasn’t the first strike.”
The file was dated three days in the future.
I turned off the screen.
I waited.
The sense of familiarity returned immediately.
The same table.
The same light.
The same waiting.
But something had changed.
I was no longer trying to discover when it had started.
Now I was trying to discover what had been erased.
I have to move my neck.
Or maybe I already did.
I’m not sure.
The photograph seems to prove one thing.
The recording another.
And the note I still haven’t found insists that the difference matters.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it the arrival noise of the next impact was already sedimented in the lime…
