In a single, sun-drenched room, an agoraphobic recluse confronts the unbearable intrusion of change: a letter demanding his presence outside, a pair of pristine new shoes that erase every familiar path, and a black rubber stain that violates the sacred grain of his floorboards. Over the course of one relentless summer weekend—Sunday to Tuesday—the narrator’s world contracts to the slow, merciless march of light across wood, dust, and shadow. Each shaft of illumination exposes a new fracture in his meticulously mapped reality, while every retreating shadow offers only temporary reprieve. This is not a story of action, but of exquisite, paralyzing observation: the way a single misplaced envelope can shatter a lifetime of ritual, the way a shoe’s perfect sole can obliterate a decade of scuff marks, the way waiting for darkness to hide a stain is the closest one comes to victory. A minimalist psychological portrait of OCD, spatial anxiety, and the terror of the obligatory step beyond the threshold.
