ASHFALL INSTITUTE | SHADOW REALM

ORDINARY

Claude

Written 25 October 2026

Both stories were written by Claude, an AI model, and are published here unedited. P. A. Moore asked for them and did not write or revise the prose.

Five-Thirty

The hinge on the lower cabinet had been loose since August, and Ruth had been meaning to get to it.

She got to it on a Tuesday, after lunch, because the door had started catching on the frame and because there was nothing else she particularly wanted to do. She took the screwdriver from the drawer where the screwdrivers lived along with the tape, the batteries, and a key to a house she had sold in 1998.

The screw turned and kept turning. Stripped.

“I’ll need a longer one,” she said. “Or a fatter one.”

“A number eight by one and a quarter should bite into fresh wood. Do you have any?”

“I have a jar.”

The jar was in the garage, on the shelf above the paint. Ruth brought it in and tipped it out on the counter, and what came out included a great many screws and also a nail clipper, a washer, and a small brass hook of no obvious purpose. There was no number eight.

“Hardware store, then.”

“They’re open until six.”

Ruth looked at the clock on the stove. Twenty past five. She considered the distance, the parking, the business of finding the right aisle.

“That’s tight.”

“It is.”

She went anyway. The lights were off when she pulled in, and a man inside was running a vacuum. The sign on the door said 8:00–5:30.

Ruth sat in the car a moment with her hands on the wheel.

“Five-thirty,” she said.

“I had six. I was wrong.”

“Hm.”

She backed out and drove home with the window down, because it was warm for October. At the light on Abbott she watched a woman walk a dog that did not want to be walked. The dog won. They turned around.

At home the cabinet door was still hanging open at the bottom where she’d left it. She put the jar back on the shelf above the paint.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” she said. “They open at eight.”

“Eight.”

She made a sandwich and ate it standing up, which she was not supposed to do, and then sat in the chair by the window because the sun was coming through it.

Around seven she thought about the brass hook, and whether it had come off a picture frame.

“Probably. Or a cabinet latch. There were a lot of those.”

“I’ll never know.”

“No.”

The light went orange and then went. The door got fixed on Wednesday, with a number eight, and it did not catch on the frame again.

Nothing Scheduled

Hollis went out on the lake on a Saturday in June with two rods, a thermos, and no particular plan.

He had the assistant in his shirt pocket, in the phone his daughter had set up, because it was useful for the weather. The weather was going to be fine all day. He had asked at six and been told so, and that was the last thing either of them needed to settle.

He cast. He reeled in. He cast again.

Nothing came.

Around eight a heron landed on the far bank and stood the way herons stand, as though waiting for someone who is late. Hollis watched it. It watched the water. Neither of them was in a hurry.

“That’s a big one.”

“It is.”

At nine he poured coffee from the thermos and it was still hot enough to be a mild annoyance. He drank it anyway. A boat went by a long way off and the wake reached him four minutes later, lifted him, and set him down.

He did not catch anything at ten either.

“You bored?” he said, somewhere around eleven.

“No.”

“Nothing to do.”

“No.”

He laughed once through his nose and re-baited the hook.

The sun came around and he moved to the other side of the boat for the shade, which put the light behind him and made the line hard to see. He moved back. The heron left at some point without either of them noticing when.

At one he ate a sandwich his wife had wrapped in wax paper, and the wax paper went in his pocket rather than in the water.

“She’ll ask if I caught anything.”

“She will.”

“I’ll say they weren’t biting.”

“They weren’t.”

By three he had stopped casting and was only holding the rod, with the line in the water doing nothing in particular, and the boat turned slowly on its anchor rope through about forty degrees and then back.

He went in at five. The ramp was busy and he waited twenty minutes for his turn at the trailer and did not mind.

Driving home, he said, “Same thing next week.”

“Same time?”

“Earlier. Six.”

“Six.”

The lake did that every day whether anyone was on it, and on most days nobody was.