Written by SANAZ SHOBIKEH
Flora Clansteel had a habit of filling glasses for people who weren’t thirsty.
She learned it from her mother, who covered every glass at night with a saucer because, she said, dust had nowhere else to go.
When Flora was eight, she asked, “Who is the water for?”
Her mother was kneading dough.
“Whoever needs it.”
“There’s nobody here.”
Her mother smiled without looking up.
“Not yet.”
Flora remembered the answer long after she forgot most of the things her mother had said.
She was seventy-one when the building caught fire.
At 2:25 p.m., Flora was on the sixth floor of a medical clinic, waiting for a prescription she had not needed until the doctor insisted.
At 2:26, the lights went out.
At 2:27, smoke appeared beneath the eastern doors.
At 2:28, the alarm began its thin mechanical ringing.
Flora walked toward the stairs and found a man lying in the corridor.
She tried to lift him.
He was heavier than he looked.
His wallet had fallen from his coat.
Adrian Bardo.
Inside was a photograph of two girls beside a birthday cake. The younger one was missing a front tooth.
Flora turned the photograph over.
Nothing was written there.
She put it back.
Adrian was breathing badly.
Then he stopped.
Flora pressed two fingers beneath his jaw.
Waited.
Pressed again.
There was no pulse to misunderstand.
Smoke pushed beneath the door.
Flora looked around the room.
A water dispenser stood in the corner.
She filled a paper cup.
Then she placed it beside Adrian.
Not in his hand.
Not against his lips.
Beside him.
She straightened the cup when it leaned.
Then she sat down.
Far beneath the city, in rooms without windows, a clerk watched the event appear on his screen.
The Department had been recording human actions for longer than anyone could remember.
It did not predict.
It traced.
A hand reaching for a doorknob led to a memory. The memory led to a childhood. The childhood led to parents, weather, hunger, accidents, blood.
Given enough information, the chain always went somewhere.
The clerk entered the new event.
2:29:07 — FLORA CLANSTEEL FILLS CUP WITH WATER.
A second line appeared.
2:29:08 — SUBJECT PLACES CUP BESIDE DECEASED MALE.
He began the usual search.
Visual stimulus: cracked lips.
Emotional response: compassion.
Origin: childhood memory.
The chain opened backward.
Mother.
Grandmother.
Village.
Drought.
Migration.
Hunger.
Marriage.
Birth.
The clerk watched the causes accumulate.
Then the system reached the final action.
It stopped.
The screen remained white.
After several seconds:
CAUSE INSUFFICIENT.
The clerk checked the timestamp.
2:29:08.
He ran it again.
The same.
His supervisor came.
Then another clerk.
“Perhaps she thought he was alive.”
The recording showed Flora checking his pulse twice.
“Shock?”
Her cognition was clear.
“Habit?”
No previous instance could be found.
The oldest clerk in the room leaned toward the screen.
“What did she expect?”
Nobody answered.
On the monitor, the cup sat beside the dead man.
They searched Flora’s life.
She had stolen three pears at nine and confessed only because one had rolled beneath her bed.
At twenty-six, she married Peter and discovered, years later, that she had loved him most when he was asleep.
At thirty-one, she quit a bakery job after discovering that the owner mixed yesterday’s unsold bread into the fresh loaves for the next morning. She said nothing. She simply stopped coming in.
At forty, she moved an injured bird beneath a hedge, although she knew it would probably die.
At forty-five, she stopped speaking to her sister.
On the 312th day, she called.
Neither woman apologized.
They talked about tomatoes.
At fifty-six, Flora began writing people’s names on the backs of receipts because she was afraid she would forget them.
She forgot the receipts instead.
The Department found causes for nearly everything.
The cruelties had histories.
The kindnesses had histories.
Even the things Flora called accidents had parents.
They followed the chain backward until, fifty-two years before the fire, they reached a rainy Tuesday.
Flora was nineteen.
She was late for work.
A snail was crossing the pavement.
She stopped.
Moved it onto the grass.
Continued walking.
No one saw.
Nothing depended on it.
The Department searched for the cause.
It found possibilities.
None was sufficient.
Buried in an old municipal archive, they found a folded sheet of paper.
Flora’s handwriting.
I moved the snail because I wanted to.
Below it:
I don’t know why.
That was all.
The Chief Accountant read the note twice.
“Why did she move it?”
The clerk looked at the empty field on his screen.
“We don’t know.”
“Everything has a cause.”
“Perhaps.”
The Chief Accountant looked up.
It was the first time the clerk had heard uncertainty in his voice.
He turned back to the note.
“That’s not the same as knowing why.”
Neither spoke for a while.
Then the Chief Accountant closed the file.
“Leave it.”
The clerk stared at him.
“Unresolved?”
“Yes.”
“For the first time?”
The Chief Accountant stood.
“For the first time.”
The next morning, the clerk was entering the day’s records when he stopped.
His finger rested on a key.
He knew the number that belonged there.
He knew the number was correct.
He changed it anyway.
One became two.
He waited for the alarm.
Nothing happened.
The Department continued humming.
He looked at the altered record.
There was no reason he could name.
He could have fixed it.
He didn’t.
Somewhere above them, a woman who had planned to catch the 11:10 train stopped for coffee.
A man who was supposed to meet her arrived early.
A child dropped a red balloon.
The man caught it.
The child laughed.
The woman missed her train.
Nothing terrible followed.
Nothing miraculous.
The day simply moved a fraction away from the path the Department had recorded.
The clerk watched the numbers settle.
Then he opened the oldest ledger.
Its first principle had survived nine thousand years of careful copying:
EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS HAS A CAUSE.
He took a pen.
He drew a line through it.
Beneath the sentence, he wrote:
We don’t know.
He closed the ledger.
No alarm sounded.
That was the frightening part.
The Department eventually classified Flora’s file as an unresolved irregularity.
The cup was catalogued under OBJECTS OF NO CONSEQUENCE.
The photograph of Adrian’s daughters was returned to his family.
The girls grew up.
One became a dentist.
The other moved overseas.
Neither ever learned about the water.
Flora’s final record remained unchanged:
REASON FOR ACTION: UNKNOWN.
Below it:
OBSERVABLE CONSEQUENCE: NONE.
Years later, someone added a third line.
No one knew who.
Perhaps that is not the same as no consequence.
The Department searched for the writer.
They found nothing.
Eventually, they stopped looking.
That autumn, rain came early.
In a kitchen somewhere above the city, an old woman filled a glass of water.
She covered it with a saucer.
There was nobody else in the room.
She stood there for a moment, listening to the rain.
Then she lifted the saucer and drank.
Outside, on the wet pavement, a snail moved slowly toward the grass.
The woman never saw it.
It kept going.
.
SANAZ SHOBIKEH (pen name: NIVA NIK), is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist based in Shiraz, Iran, and works at Shiraz University. Moving between poetry, fiction, screenwriting, theatre, and visual art, she is drawn to the places where memory becomes unstable, identity begins to fracture, and the familiar quietly turns strange. Her work explores transformation, absence, silence, and the hidden lives of things that appear ordinary. Her play, Legend of Reality, rooted in the mythological world of the Shahnameh, has received national-level approval for stage production and is forthcoming in performance. Across forms, she seeks to create intimate, atmospheric works that leave questions behind rather than answers—and continue unfolding in the mind after the work itself has ended.