Dism Page

The list grew. It became a kind of map, though she wasn’t sure what territory it charted. Her own life, she supposed. The low-grade tragedy of it. Not the big tragedies—those were someone else’s stories, the ones with news reports and fundraisers and groups that met in church basements. Hers were the small disms. The cumulative weight of a thousand tiny absences.

But dism had begun to follow her more closely. It would tap her on the shoulder in the subway, just as the train pulled into a station she didn’t need. It would settle into the chair across from her at cafés, not speaking, just watching. On Tuesday nights, when Priya was out and the radiator clanked and the neighbor’s television murmured through the wall, dism would lie down beside her in the dark. It never touched her. That was the worst part. The list grew

Mila understood. That was the thing about naming something—it didn’t create the thing, but it made it visible. Like constellations. The stars were always there, but until someone drew lines between them, you couldn’t see the bear, the hunter, the swan. The low-grade tragedy of it