“And moving through a mirror clear”

Autumn had come, so it was still dark outside when she entered the apartment. Inside, the bright bluish light lessened her melatonin production while she was wondering for a moment whether to take the first door or the second a little further down the corridor. The first one, however, only led into a vacant bathroom, so she approached the second one.

The absolute silence that shrouded her presence was inevitable rather than purposeful or even deliberate.

A muted chuckle grew imperceptibly louder.

Through the door the corridor opened into a room which, she surmised, was much bigger than it felt. Carefully avoiding little piles of computer hardware that littered the floor, she made her way across toward a desk, occupied by a laptop, and a chair in front of it, occupied by a person—the chuckle, it seemed, emanated from him. Soon the person’s eyes left the screen and, by that, the six hundred and forty second xkcd comic while the chuckle was fading. He turned around and beheld an empty room, for she was an incorporeal third-person narrator, invisible, impalpable. But she was not omniscient: Unknown even to her, in one corner of the room there leaned yet another third-person narrator, invisible, impalpable.

Though no less limited, he saw her and much later narrated this.

Column

I sat precariously perched on a high counter,
My feet motionlessly suspended in midair,
Between ten hours apprehension (sleep was rare)
And the impending exam that was making me founder.
With a “resting” heart rate beyond 110 bpm
(Had I been truly resting, I would’ve had 50 less)
I leaned back feeling one concrete column’s caress.
They are stable, they are solid—much solace I find in them.
I tried to envision the test’s many sheets
But way too scarce seemed my knowledge of them,
So my thoughts trailed off—
Past and future coalesce.
Beholding this chaos I acquiesce
To the futility to sort out that BS,
And no longer with the temporal I obsess.
So I went up.
Ascending staircases terminated in pellucid cages
Where sunlight glass in a play of iridescence engages.
All around you, many more of such stages!
Only, the exits are locked which imminent boredom presages.
So I went down.
The basement’s embrace, a musty odor plus the heating.
The occasional lamps dye the darkness ocher; some are conceding
While thirty yards south the rays of multicolored neon tubes are meeting.
And writing this line, in its perfunctory design, naturally is cheating.
So I returned.
To my column.

Poetaster

(Thanks to Andy Weir for the Planet Devourer, someone else for the raven and Poe for The Raven.)