Melody lay in bed on her side and watched the morning light slide up the door.

  From this same position, her carvings had, in previous months, assumed other forms, the numbers turned on their sides to resemble (aside from the cursive w that might've been some cave drawing of an upside-down seagull, or the upturned arches of a fast food restaurant, or perhaps a cat's upper lip) unreadable ideograms with meanings long routed—if ever they'd been otherwise—from the forms out of which they'd emerged.

  But in no previous iteration had they been so malevolent as the one staring back at her now.

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  Tilted clockwise ninety degrees, the number revealed itself for what it truly was.

∞

  The duration of her sentence. The dimensions of the cell which held her. Not an accumulation as she'd intended but rather an integration, an extrapolation from marker to tally, the extension of one month to all months and to all time, to ranges entirely without limit as if written within its lateralized geometry lay a cautioning, the index of some cardinality far beyond its own that spoke in its unboundedness of a perpetuity whose delineations could not be measured by any other save her.

  She thought of getting up and scratching the number out but she had no idea where her knife was. The sunlight moved up the door and crawled across the ceiling and then it was night.