The Annotated Future

She did not sleep. She read the pages in order, the way you walk a corridor in the dark, hand on the wall, knowing there is a stair and not knowing where. He had been translating her future. Not predicting it — there was no fortune-teller's vagueness in Wren's lines, no *a journey* or *a stranger*. He wrote in the Aurelian tongue and then under each phrase set down its plain English, and each English phrase had come true on the day it named. *Subject finds this box on the third morning.* She had. *Subject is told nothing of how I died.* She had not been. He had translated her week before she lived it, and the world, finding the sentence true, had simply obeyed. At first the entries were tender. He had clearly meant well. *Let her be happy here. Let the chestnuts last. Let her not be lonely as I was.* He had used the tongue the way a grandfather might use a wish, trying to bend her autumn toward kindness, and the autumn had bent. She thought of the porter's odd gentleness, the chestnuts still holding their leaves, the second-year who had befriended her unasked. Wren had been arranging her happiness from inside his grave, sentence by careful sentence, and never once asked if she wanted it arranged. Then, near the end, the hand changed again, and so did the tense. *I have made an error,* he wrote. *To translate a living person is to take their tense from them. Every line I