He stared at her with what was probably a normal amount of eyes.

“I’ll need to start talking to people. All over town. Try to find anyone who knows him. Listen carefully to what they say and what they don’t say.”

“Did you just mention a man in a tan jacket?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, turning back to the front and reestablishing the wall between her and her fellow customers eating at a diner counter, or the “eighth wall” as it is known in the world of theater.

She decided to make a list of everyone who might know about this mysterious man. She pulled out the pen she used for writing tickets at the pawnshop. It was a promotional pen from a festival put on by the city a few years ago.

THE NIGHT VALE SHAKESPEARE IN A PIT FESTIVAL. FALL INTO THE BARD’S WORDS.

it said. The broken leg had been painful, but she did love the pen.

She searched her pockets for anything to write on and could find nothing. The blank tickets were kept at the pawnshop, and anyway they were only for writing claim tickets. There is a way things are done. Although that moment they were not being done. Her existence was premised on everything being the same, every day, and the paper was insistently different. It was impossible to sink into a blissful holding pattern with a mysterious paper in her hand.

There were no menus or place mats to write on, and then she looked down at her left hand and the paper. Of course. She put the paper on the counter, wrote “LIST” at the top of the blank side.

Or at least “LIST” was what she intended to write. Instead, she wrote “KING CITY.”

“No,” she said, to her own hand. She crossed out what she had written and wrote “LIST.”

Except that it still looked a lot like “KING CITY.”

“No,” she said again. She would not accept it. Not this too.

Maybe it was the surface. She pushed the paper aside (where it immediately sprang back, the marks from the pen completely gone, into her left hand) and wrote directly on the counter.

“Hey,” said Laura, the waitress, as she walked by. “I’ll have to clean that later.”

Laura had many branches growing from her body, laden with fruit.

“TEST,” Jackie wrote on the counter. And again it came out as “KING CITY.” She yelled in frustration. The man with the long forehead and the woman with the clipboard glared at her. Teenagers don’t usually write things while yelling, they thought, worried.

“Shhh,” said a voice from under the man’s hat.