The Work of Autumn
Overview
In the city they called Clearwater, the morning arrived already formatted.
Autumn works on the seventeenth floor of the Directorate, a glass building where the city's memories are processed the way banks once processed money. She came from financial compliance, where she learned to read transactions for what they were trying not to say, and now she does the same work on grief, on longing, on the kind of dreaming that leaves a footprint the system can measure. She compresses. She reframes. She keeps the dashboard green, and the Summer Index, the city's official measure of its own contentment, holds at ninety-two-point-seven, as it always holds.
But she reads every full file. She never adds the resource links. And in a small black notebook with no official existence she keeps the account her mother taught her to keep, so that later, if someone tells you things were different than they were, you can open the book and show them what the body survived.
Then a case arrives from an archive no floor officer is supposed to be able to reach. The subject field carries her own name. Inside it is a memory of a crowd, a banner, and a woman looking straight through the years at her and saying: Autumn. Don't flinch.
The Work of Autumn is a novel about memory administered as care, about the machinery that turned Know Your Customer into Know Your Personhood, and about a violence that requires no villain, only enough people to find the work clean. It is also a novel about the small, stubborn practices through which people refuse to let the record be the only record: a coffee held in both hands, a door frame touched on the way to work, a case left open because it isn't finished yet.
The Summer Index holds. The leaves are changing anyway.
This item is Non-Returnable
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798177835556
- ISBN-10: 9798177835556
- Publisher: Independently Published
- Publish Date: September 2026
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.47 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.62 pounds
- Page Count: 206
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