Krakow smelled of rain and fresh bread when Eve emerged from the stairwell at St Philip's with a thermal mug and a pocket stuffed with pencils. For as long as she could remember, letters had been arranging themselves in her head, improving the world without asking permission: commas rearranged themselves like pawns, dots sat in their places with relief. She had inherited a silver watch from her grandfather, who had worked in the old print shop on St Mark's. It was heavy and warm when she wound it, and at 11:11 every day it froze on the second hand, as if the city was holding its breath for a moment. On the corner of Krowoderska, an old bakery sign had been proclaiming 'Drożdzówki' for months. Ms Irena, the owner, shrugged her shoulders when someone pointed out the eaten 'ż'. Eve took a short, worn piece of chalk out of her bag, which she already carried probably more for luck than necessity, and in one movement she added a tail, soft as a memory hook. The letter shimmered a moment, as if completing something beyond the word. - 'You've got a hand,' said Mrs Irena, leaning her elbows on the counter. - Just please don't correct the prices. Eve smiled and continued along the Planty. The fog hung low over the lawn like a curtain drape. The number 3 tram glided along the tracks, the bell ringing in a draughty tone, as if checking the acoustics of the morning. At the stop, next to the timetable board, someone had pasted an advertisement for piano lessons. In the text "play every Friday" someone had crossed out the "in" and overwritten "every". Eve could not take her eyes off the red pen mark, reflexively looking for a margin in which to explain the difference. The café in Szczepanski Square was warm and dark, like the back room of a bookshop. The black board with the menu was missing a comma after 'coffee', which stung her eyes like a blade in a woollen jumper. Antek, a barista in a faded shirt, waved to her from across the room. - 'Today do you have a taste for cappuccino or a quiet semester? - He asked, because ever since she once corrected him on 'espresso', he liked to mix coffees with terms. - Today I'm taking the quiet. And a cappuccino,' she replied. She sat down by the window and opened the file for correction. On the screen flashed the tentative sentences of one of those debunkers who don't yet know what they want to say. Pencil marks appeared in her head before she could enter them with the cursor: insert, delete, move. As she raised her gaze, through the glass she saw a boy on the pavement mending a girl's scarf. A small gesture, and suddenly something clicked in her head in a place she hadn't been able to name before. She turned her watch over and checked the time. 11:10. The light in the café dimmed by a shade, as if someone had buried the sun deeper in the clouds. The sounds became clearer. A teaspoon clattered against a saucer, a door creaked a millimetre in the corner. 11:11. The second hand hovered. At the same instant, the menu board above the bar trembled, and the chalkboard sign "Cappuccino £12" got a comma after "cappuccino" all by itself. Fine, perfect, as if drawn on by an invisible hand. Antek looked at her questioningly. - Can you see that? Instead of answering, Eve turned back to the window. At the stop opposite, the digital display that usually told how many minutes the tram would arrive in had changed font and stretched the letters like rubber. The 'you' had disappeared from the '2 minutes', and the other characters lined up slowly, as if they had a breath of their own. After a while, the display showed: "Go left". Her first reaction was to laugh nervously. This is some kind of joke, she thought, maybe a new marketing stunt by the theatre. But Antek was standing next to her, staring, with a cloth murmured in his hand. Someone at the table next to him was cursing under his breath, staring at his phone screen, as if waiting for a notification with a delivery that wasn't coming. Raindrops began tapping on the glass at even intervals, like typographical dots transferred from paper to glass. As the pointer of the watch twitched back to life, the display returned to decay. Eve drank her coffee in one gulp. The pile of unsent emails in her inbox rustled in her mind like tests to be reviewed before the end of the day. She decided she would do what she always did when something happened that didn't fit in the boxes: write it down neatly and then see if she could sort it out. At the checkout, she asked for a receipt. On the receipt, under the heading 'cappuccino', was the letter 'c' swapped carelessly for 'ć'. She ran her finger over the slippery paper. When she turned the sheet over, on the back in chalk - why chalk on a thermal receipt? - someone had drawn an insertion mark: a triangular canopy. Between the arms of the canopy stood a single word: "Today". She stepped out into the air, which smelled of lead and lime tea, and immediately noticed another change. On the bookshop window, where novelties with titles in thick, trendy fonts were arranged, the letters had shifted slightly, as if someone had poked them from the inside. "Novelties" scattered across the glass for a second to form the word "fruity", then went back into place. It made no sense. And yet a shiver ran down Eve's spine, something like joy and fear at the same time. She wasn't superstitious, she didn't believe in signs, she liked facts where a full stop could be put. But commas are sometimes more important than full stops. At the first bench in the Planty, she stopped, sat down and opened her watch. On the inside flap, among the scratches she had never looked at so closely before, she noticed a delicate engraving that could have been a coincidence or something else entirely: "11:11 - look for the margin". Her grandfather never talked about such things. He talked about the vignette, about the seals, about the ink that goes into the nails and refuses to be washed off. About a set of fonts that were touched like ice cubes. About a machine that had a rhythm like the heart of a sleeping horse. "Margin" in his mouth had always been a place for the text to breathe, a space that must not be seized. Now the word sounded like an address. She stood up. Maple leaves clung to the branches with remnants of pride, the wind browsing them like a sample catalogue. Eve moved towards St Mark's, passing a chemist's shop with milky glass. Whenever she passed this way, she imagined old prescribers sitting behind the glass discussing cases. Today, the milky glass had thin, almost invisible dashes on it, drawing proofreader marks in the air. Insert, move, delete. At the former print shop, she stopped reflexively. The building where her grandfather had once worked stood as it did: the plaster was coming off in ripples, but the proportions of the windows were still such that her gaze lingered on them with pleasure. The door, which she remembered as heavy oak, had long ago been replaced with a plain steel grey one. Nevertheless, she felt that it was here. Something in the air vibrated, as if someone was quietly tapping a rhythm underneath. A narrow passageway ran along the side of the building, which she had never noticed. The wall on the left was as smooth as a reduced page without footnotes. On the right, the bricks were the colour of old tea. At eye level, someone had scratched out a sign: the same triangular canopy as on the receipt. Above it - a small line, like a pause. - 'Don't go there yourself,' said reason in her head, which usually helped her choose the right font. But her feet were already tapping on the uneven cobblestones, joining in rhythm with what was coming from inside the building. She squeezed into an aisle. It was cooler here, the smell of old paper mingling with the dampness. At the end of the blind corridor, the wall was no longer quite a wall. The edges cut off as if sharper, as if the bricks were pretending to be bricks. She touched her fingers - cool, but she felt a slight tremor under her palm, as gentle as the beginning of a word on the tip of her tongue. The watch in her pocket purred quietly. She took it out and saw that the hands were again trying to catch up with the time. 11:10 a.m. She swallowed her saliva. A laugh came from somewhere in the street, someone yawned protractedly in the tram. The world stood just around the bend like a sentence without a full stop. 11:11. The second hand stopped - and with it, the tremor in the bricks grew by a fraction, as if someone on the other side was leaning with their back against the same wall. The grout line glowed for a moment, a thin light like a neon illuminating a letter in a large sign. Eve drew her hand back and saw that there were shadows of proofreading marks on the bricks: "insert", an up arrow, a small "essential" symbol. Just below them, more clearly than before, the outline of a rectangle emerged. Not a door. The margin. In the middle of the margin something flashed. It sounded like the breath of a typesetting machine, like a sheet of paper sliding under an ink roller. Antek would text her that they were making quick sandwiches today because it was raining. Mrs Irena from the bakery might have just been putting the yeast on the griddle, correcting the 'ż' with pride. The city was going on, and yet here it was, like a bracket. Eve raised her hand and, before she had time to ask any more reasonable questions, touched the centre of the glowing rectangle. The brick under her finger became as soft as cardboard before soaking. The watch in her hand ticked louder until it pierced the silence like an exclamation mark. The bulbs in the joints rustled. And on the other side, very close by, someone - or something - answered with a tap, even and decisive, like a dot finally placed at the end of a sentence that until now had not known how to close.