The sensation was like something settling into place. A small sound, almost not a sound, the kind of thing you hear in a house at night when the temperature changes and the walls contract slightly. Beld had been hearing it since he was seven years old, when he first understood what it was. He was forty-six now. He had heard it approximately six million times.
He had not found anyone else who could hear it. He had stopped looking in his late twenties. Most people, when he described it, looked at him with a specific kind of attention that meant they were not sure whether to be curious or worried. He had learned to stop describing it, mostly. It did not require description. It was simply there, reliable, the continuous record of what had just been and was no longer being.
This morning: breakfast, his daughter asking where her jacket was, his wife finding it by the back door. The sound arrived twice in quick succession, once when the toast came up, once when his daughter left the room with her jacket. He had not heard it yet in connection with his wife. Sometimes a morning passed like that, with the sound arriving for some people in the room and not others. He did not know what that meant. He had spent a lot of years not knowing what it meant.
His daughter was fifteen. The morning she had been seven was in the record like any other morning, with its own settling sound at the precise moment when she had been seven and was no longer being seven in the present tense. He heard all of them: all the times she had been a particular age and then stopped being that age, the sound arriving at the threshold each time.
At the end of each day he lay in the dark and waited. It always came. The small sound, something shifting into place, and then the day was in the record and he was in the next one. He had never once missed it. He was not sure whether this was a gift or a discipline or simply the kind of person he was, and he had reached the age where he suspected he would not find out.