NELLE 9 | 2026
Excerpt
There is a room in the television. There is almost always a room in the television; today, it is AUTUMN WITCH COTTAGE AMBIENCE. A woodstove, potbellied, warm light behind its barred grate; a pile of gourds spilling over the wood floor; the air thick with sparkling motes; a tome laying open on the farmstyle table, next to a mortar and pestle that are slightly too big for the scale of the rest of the scene. There is movement: the light in the woodstove flickers, the motes fall and are replaced, the richly hued leaves outside the window flutter in an unceasing wind, moving like shoals of fish. The motion is on a loop, but there are many kinds of motion and the loops for each kind are of different speeds—at least, they are in the higher-quality rooms that you prefer, such as AUTUMN WITCH COTTAGE AMBIENCE—and most of the time you do not sit and watch the room continuously for longer than a minute, so it is easy to decide that the repetition is unnoticeable, which is for all practical purposes the same as its not existing in the first place.
There is also music. The music is your least favorite part of these rooms, and most of the time you mute the television and play something else on your headphones when a room is on; it’s inevitably a generic looping track of soothing piano and strings and low percussion, filler music, a type of sound that draws attention to the filler-nature of the room itself, which you dislike and work hard to overlook. You cannot overlook this when the music is on, and the illusion is better, more complete, with your preferred music, even if it does not tonally match the room. It used to be that other people would tell you that your choices of music were strange, or sad, or ridiculous. (It used to be that each person with whom you could conceivably discuss music had one, at most two safe genres or artists that overlapped with yours, and you carefully matched the genre to the person. When you drove people to locations, you had a car playlist for each individual.) Your headphones make a second room, a room the size of your skull, which overlaps with the room in the television. Today, it is the soundtrack for a film about a beheaded knight and a rash promise. The score is at once jagged and trancelike, with a deep echo to it, menacing and plaintive. Its long stretches of instrumentals are intercut with medieval carols, performed on lute, recorder, and hand drum. It makes you feel like a lightless forest is growing in your chest. You used to listen to this soundtrack frequently, and it always brings with it a shadow of that time, though not quite enough to make you believe that you could recover it. (You were not as you are now. The explanation for this change is dreary.)