9 October 2026
Friday. While hunting for a pencil sharpener I opened the bottom drawer, and the corridor was waiting for me exactly where I left it.
Five years in a drawer has done it good. The prison has a name now: Ironwood Penitentiary, closed by order long ago, except for one wing at the back that nobody bothered to check. The gaoler has a title. He is the Keeper. He stayed behind when the guards went home, and he has kept the old timetable running ever since, out of sheer good manners.
He has a ledger, ruled in red, with names in copperplate and a date beside each. He has a chair at the end of the Row, behind a steel door, and he calls it Mercy. I asked him why. He said it was the kindest thing anybody on the Row would ever be shown, and then he went quiet, and so did I.
The studio once pencilled a year beside this project. That year came and went, which the Keeper took personally. Nobody is promising a new one, and I have been told firmly not to invent one in this diary. Very well. No dates. Not even for him.
I have bought a second new notebook. The van has one; the Row deserves its own.
— U.
