Dism -

Mila held the notebook against her chest. She didn’t open it. Not then. She took it home and set it on her nightstand, next to her own notebook—the one full of lists, the one she hadn’t written in since that Sunday morning in December.

There was a long pause. She could hear him breathing on the other end, slow and steady. Then he said, “Do you know why I started collecting dism?”

For a long time, she just looked at them. Two notebooks. Two lives’ worth of disms. All those small tragedies, named and collected and held at arm’s length. Mila held the notebook against her chest

The second time, she was fourteen. Her mother had just sat down at the kitchen table, phone still in her hand, face the color of dishwater. “Your grandfather,” she said, and then stopped. The rest of the sentence didn’t come. Instead, Mila felt the word rise up from somewhere behind her ribs—not spoken, but present. Dism . She didn’t say it aloud. But it sat between them for the rest of the afternoon, a fourth presence in the room, while her mother made tea that went cold and Mila pretended to do homework.

dism

She started keeping a notebook. Not a diary—she’d tried those and filled them with stiff, performative entries about her day. This was different. She wrote down every instance of dism she could remember, then every new one as it arrived.

After the service, a woman approached her. Late forties, red-eyed, wearing a pendant that caught the light. “You must be Mila,” she said. “Dad talked about you.” She took it home and set it on

“Do you ever feel like there’s a word—not a real word, but a feeling—that doesn’t have a name? And you keep running into it, over and over, and you can’t explain it to anyone because there’s no word for it?”

“How?” she whispered.