A little boy walks up to a man. Tugs on his shirtsleeve.

“Hey mister,” he says. The man looks down.

The two stare each other down for a moment, then the man says, “Can I help you?”

The little boy thinks for a moment. He pulls some scraps of paper from his shorts pocket. Scrawled on the sheets are morphemes forming words forming phrases forming sentences that the man instantly recognizes as his own.

“Where did you get these?” the man says, almost shouting, ripping the papers from the little boy’s hand. Before the boy has a chance to answer, he disappears. In his place, a teenager sits at a desk, headphones screwed tightly in his ears, the sounds of Minor Threat emanating from them in a way that foreshadows a particularly nasty case of tinnitus.

On the desk are different sheets of paper, whole sheets – words pack each page, front and back, single-spaced. The writing, still familiar.