4338.205 · July 24, 2018 AD
Muscle Memory
Claire wakes to a body that has forgotten how to be a body. Every movement — standing, walking, reaching for the tap — must be consciously willed, each step a negotiation between the woman she was yesterday and whatever she is now. But the world outside her front door doesn't know that. The servo needs visiting, the car needs petrol, and the people of Broken Hill are going to ask about Paul. The body remembers how to smile. Whether the woman inside it does is another question entirely.
This quest maps the geography between private collapse and public composure. Claire surfaces from medicated sleep into a home that feels hostile in its stillness, where the simple act of showering and dressing becomes a feat of engineering — the body moved through space like a marionette whose operator is only half paying attention. There is a mechanical quality to her survival, each task completed not because she wants to but because the sequence exists and her limbs know the order.
When she finally leaves the house, the arena shifts from the physical to the social. Broken Hill is a town where everyone knows your name, your husband, your business. Claire moves through it with the practised ease of someone who has lived here long enough to know which smile to wear and which questions to deflect. She scans every street for Paul's car with the peripheral vigilance of someone who has learned to track a threat without appearing to look. At the servo, casual conversation lands like a test she hasn't studied for — people mention Paul with the easy warmth of neighbours who have no idea what that name now costs her. She passes. She always passes. The town sees exactly what it expects to see, and Claire files that small victory away without ever questioning what it's costing her to earn it.
