The table cost twenty-five dollars. I bought it at a secondhand furniture store on Main Street because my apartment needed a table and twenty-five dollars was all I had after paying rent.

My name is Billy Cross. I'm thirty-one years old. I used to work at the warehouse on the east side, but they laid me off three months ago. They laid off half the warehouse. Then the other half. Now the warehouse is empty and the parking lot is full of weeds.

I live in a third-floor walkup that smells like mildew and someone else's cooking. The carpet is stained and the radiator clanks like a dying engine. I have a daughter—she lives with her mother in Cleveland. I see her twice a year, usually at Christmas when the visiting isn't free.

The table was ugly. Scratched surface, one leg shorter than the others, had to be propped up with a brick. But it was a table. And it was mine.

I dragged it up three flights of stairs by myself. By myself, because I don't have anyone to help me with anything.

That night, I got a phone call. The phone was on the table—the scratched, ugly table—and it rang at eleven o'clock. I answered it because what else do you do at eleven at night when you're alone in an apartment that smells like mildew?

A woman's voice. "We're here to test whether you deserve to live."

I hung up. Thought it was a prank. Some kid with a distorted voice and too much time.

Next morning, I woke up and felt wrong. Not sick, not exactly. But something was off. My body felt like it was vibrating at a frequency I couldn't hear. I sat at the table to drink my coffee—black, no sugar—and the vibration stopped.

I stood up. It started again.

I sat down. It stopped.

I stood up. It started again. Faster this time. Deeper. Like something inside me was trying to shake itself apart.

I sat down. Silence.

I tried to throw the table away. Drove it to the dump on the edge of town. The dump man looked at me like I was crazy but took it anyway. I drove home. Came back the next morning and the table was in my apartment. On the spot where it had been. With the scratch in the same place. With the brick under the same leg.

I called the police. The officer who came out was young, maybe twenty-five, with a face that still believed in things. He looked at the table. He looked at me. He asked if I'd been sleeping. I said no. He wrote something in his notebook and left.

I tried to leave town. Drove north on Route 30. Got to the edge of town limits and the vibration started. Not in my body this time—in my head. A pressure, like my skull was too small for my brain. I pulled over on the shoulder and sat in my car and cried. I haven't cried since I was a boy.

I drove back.

I called the number on the phone—the number the woman had called from. It rang once.

"Hello?" Her voice. Calm. Patient. Tired.

"I want to know what's happening to me," I said.

"The table has chosen you, Billy."

"How do I get rid of it?"

"You can't. It's chosen you."

"Then what do I do?"

"You sit. You wait. And when someone else comes—someone as lost as you are—you ask them a question."

"What question?"

"Whether they deserve to live."

"How do I know you're not lying?"

"Because I'm not. And because you already know the truth. You've always known it."

She hung up.

I sat at the table. The vibration stopped. The apartment was quiet. The radiator clanked. Somewhere outside, a dog barked.

I sat there for a long time. Long enough for the light to change from morning to afternoon to evening. Long enough for the phone to ring again.

I answered it.

A man's voice. Lost. Desperate. Alone.

"We're here to test whether you deserve to live," I said.

And that was that.

---

Objective Tensor Encoding (OTMES v2.0): Code: OTMES-v2-C74B52-052-M3-270-6R5240-9F1C E_total: 5.20 Dominant Mode: M3 (Poetic) Dominant Angle: 270° Rank: 6 Dominance Ratio: 0.52 Irreversibility: 0.9 Innocent Suffering Index: 0.90 M_Vector: [8.5, 0.5, 7.0, 7.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.0, 1.0, 1.5, 1.0] N_Vector: [0.10, 0.90] K_Vector: [0.85, 0.15] Style: Dirty Realism / Carver-esque Minimalism TI_Class: T4 (Regret Level)