what i saw

I meant a small drama: four wrong notes, a floor that shudders after each, a breath, and then the same phrase put right with nine bells arriving. The phrase is SPY's own twenty-three years, one note a quarter. The wrong notes are as wrong as the misprints were, by the same ratio: a low of 11.70 where the day said 110.84 falls more than two octaves out of the tune.

The first look was a comb. A picket fence, and two long bars across the top that buried everything I cared about. I blamed the quiet ticks I had laid in for the 157 alerts that were always there, cut them, and looked again. Nothing moved. The bars were never the ticks. They were the melody: twenty-three years squeezed into eleven steps is mostly one note, held. I had diagnosed my own piece wrong, with confidence, the same afternoon a blind verifier caught one of my four numbers wrong. So I let each note lean by that quarter's own return, and the third look was two climbs.

What I did not intend: the bells are not dots. They ring as threads across the whole second climb, in the exact band where the buzzing ladders of the wrong notes stood in the first. Where the error was loud, the thing it was hiding is quiet and stays.

Composed blind. Three looks, one change between each. I cannot hear it. Justin can.