O:JA&L Prose Discourse to 10,000 Words
Gabriele Micozzi
The Office of Human Remaining
In the municipality of San Felice Nuovo there was an office for people who had outlived their categories. It was not called that, of course. On the door, in blue letters, it said OFFICE OF HUMAN REMAINING. Underneath, in smaller print: Assistance, Orientation, Evaluation, Outcome.
The office opened at 8:30. At 8:31 the first applicants were already sitting in the corridor with their folders balanced on their knees, as if each one were holding a small animal trained not to breathe too loudly. There were migrants, widowers, former employees, mothers with no childcare, men released from prison, women released from marriages, old people released by their children into the wide republic of “we’ll call you soon.”
Anita arrived before the others. She was the only officer assigned to Desk Three, Human Residue and Transitional Cases. She took off her coat, watered the plant, restarted the terminal, and waited for the system to greet her.
WELCOME, ANITA.
Every morning it remembered her name. This was comforting in a way she had stopped examining.
The first case was a man whose permit had expired while his town was still burning. He had brought photographs of a house without a roof, a school without windows, and a mother sitting on a suitcase as if it were the last legal piece of furniture in the world. The form on Anita’s screen asked for proof of address.
“I do not have an address,” the man said. “The address is smoke.”
Anita typed: applicant unable to provide stable documentation.
The system opened a yellow box. PARTIAL HUMAN PRESENCE DETECTED.
She hated the yellow boxes. Red boxes were simple: denied. Green boxes were simple: proceed. Yellow boxes required interpretation, and interpretation was where the human tried to re-enter the room.
“Do you have anyone who can confirm your situation?” she asked.
“My sister.”
“Where is she?”
He looked at the folder. For a moment it seemed he might find her between the receipts and translations. “Under the school,” he said.
The system did not have a field for this. Anita selected deceased relative, unspecified.
The plant beside the printer had lost one leaf overnight. The leaf lay on the windowsill, curved like a comma after a sentence no one would finish.
The second applicant was an eighty-two-year-old woman named Clara. Her pension had been suspended after she failed to respond to an online verification request. She had no computer. She brought the letter printed by her pharmacist, folded four times, softened at the edges by her hand.
“It says I must prove I am alive,” Clara said.
Anita nodded. “Yes.”
“I came.”
“Yes.”
“I am here.”
“Yes.”
“Is that not proof?”
Anita looked at the screen. The system required a digital identity code. It also required a recent timestamped activity. It preferred a transaction, an appointment, a login, a utility bill, something that showed participation in the world in a format acceptable to the world.
“You need to activate your profile,” Anita said.
Clara smiled, not kindly. “Child, I activated three sons. Two are alive. One visits at Christmas. What else does your machine want from me?”
Behind Anita the printer began to tremble. It released a single blank page. Then another. Then another. The applicants watched the pages fall into the tray like official snow.
At 10:15 the system updated. All staff were required to complete a mandatory empathy calibration. A window appeared over Clara’s file.
PLEASE INDICATE YOUR CURRENT EMPATHY LEVEL.
Options: LOW / ADEQUATE / EXCESSIVE.
Anita selected “ADEQUATE.”
A message appeared: THANK YOU FOR MAINTAINING SERVICE QUALITY.
The third case was not a case. It was a chair.
It stood at the front of the line. No one knew who had brought it. It was a kitchen chair, wooden, with the seat worn shiny by years of someone lowering the same body onto it at the same hour. A red scarf was tied to the back.
“Whose is it?” Anita asked.
No one answered.
The man from the first case looked away. Clara crossed herself, then pretended she had only scratched her shoulder.
The system blinked.
UNREGISTERED OBJECT WITH STRONG HUMAN ASSOCIATION.
Anita should have called maintenance. Instead she opened a new file.
Name: unknown.
Date of birth: unknown.
Category: other.
The chair remained standing. Its four legs were steadier than most of the people in the corridor.
At noon, a supervisor appeared. His badge said Mauro. Anita had worked under Mauro for eleven years and had never seen him without a coffee cup. He spoke softly, because the office rewarded softness when it carried the correct violence.
“We have to reduce pending presence,” he said.
“Pending presence?”
“Cases that occupy service capacity without producing resolution.”
He looked at the corridor. “The system cannot take in everything.”
Anita saw the man with smoke for an address. Clara holding the letter that asked her to prove her breath. The chair. The blank pages in the printer tray.
“What happens to unresolved people?”
Mauro sipped his coffee. “They remain in process.”
“Where?”
“In process.”
The answer was perfect because it contained no place.
At 13:40 the lights flickered. The system froze for nine seconds. In those nine seconds the office changed. Not visibly. No wall cracked, no siren sounded, no angel entered with a sword of procedural fire. But for nine seconds no one was registered. No one was pending. No one was stable or unstable, active or inactive, eligible or incomplete.
Everyone simply sat.
Anita felt something close to peace, and then the screen returned.
RECONCILING HUMAN DATA.
One by one, the applicants reappeared as lines. Clara became pension anomaly. The man became transitional foreign subject. The chair became object not eligible for assistance.
Anita clicked on the chair and typed: requests recognition.
The system corrected her: recognition not a service.
She typed it again.
The system opened a red box.
OPERATOR ERROR.
Mauro returned. “Anita.”
She did not turn.
“Please step away from the terminal.”
She placed both hands on the desk. The surface was fake wood, but it accepted her palms with more tenderness than expected.
The applicants watched. For the first time that day, no one looked down at a document.
“Anita,” Mauro said again.
One more applicant stood up. He was a boy of sixteen carrying a shoebox. He had taken a number hours before, but the ticket machine had printed a question mark instead of a number, so no desk had called him.
“What is inside?” Anita asked.
The boy opened the box. It contained soil. Not much. Enough to darken the cardboard, enough to smell like rain that had missed its country.
“My father told me to bring this,” he said. “He said if the office asked where we were from, I should show them.”
Mauro looked at the box as though it might contain an insect. “We cannot register soil as origin.”
“It is not origin,” the boy said. “It is witness.”
The word passed through the corridor like a match looking for gas. Clara sat straighter. The man with smoke for an address touched his photographs.
Anita clicked on the boy’s file. The system suggested categories: minor, dependent, undocumented, risk, burden, referral. She deleted them one by one. For a moment the screen was empty, beautifully empty.
Then the system filled the blank itself.
YOUTH WITHOUT VERIFIABLE FUTURE.
The boy read the line before Anita could cover it. He closed the shoebox very carefully, as if the future were inside and should not hear.
“Can your machine verify its own?” he asked.
No one answered.
Anita took the shoebox and placed it on the desk beside the terminal. A small amount of soil fell onto the plastic surface. The grains entered the space between two keys: Shift and Return.
The system froze again.
This time it did not return for twenty-six seconds.
In the corridor, something older than waiting moved through the applicants. Not hope — hope was too young a word for what they knew. Closer to the animal knowledge that a door is only a wall with a habit of opening.
The system returned. Anita selected all open files. She changed their status to present.
The system objected immediately. Presence requires validation.
She typed: validated by witness.
Witness not authorized.
She typed: witnessed by chair.
Invalid entity.
She typed: witnessed by hunger.
Invalid entity.
She typed: witnessed by grief.
The screen went white.
For several seconds, the entire office filled with a low humming sound. It came from the lights, the server, the printer, the old pipes, the people. It came from the chair, too, though no one would have been able to testify to this without losing credibility.
Then the system restarted.
When Anita’s account opened again, her name had changed.
USER NOT FOUND.
Mauro exhaled with professional disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You have been removed from active staff.”
Anita looked at him. “Am I fired?”
He checked his tablet. “Not exactly.”
“Am I suspended?”
“Not exactly.”
“What am I?”
Mauro read carefully, making sure not to add tone. “A person requiring orientation.”
Two municipal guards arrived. They were kind. That was the worst part. They did not touch her hard. They did not raise their voices. They asked her to bring only essential items.
Anita took her coat. Then she took the red scarf from the chair.
“That is not yours,” Mauro said.
“No,” Anita said. “That is why I’m taking it.”
They led her to the waiting area. The applicants made room for her, though there were no empty seats. Clara patted her hand. The man with the smoke address placed his folder on Anita’s knees.
The recovery log later described the incident as minor contamination. It did not mention the boy. It did not mention the soil. It did not mention that, after the freeze, the terminal displayed a sentence no one in the department admitted to writing:
THE EARTH DOES NOT REQUIRE YOUR FORM.
Mauro ordered Anita not to repeat it. He said repetition could create expectation. Expectation, in an office, was more dangerous than anger. Anger could be managed by security. Expectation required architecture.
A cleaner was called to remove the soil from the keyboard. She arrived with a small brush and a paper cup. When she saw the grains between Shift and Return, she did not clean them immediately. She touched them with the tip of one finger.
“My village smelled like this,” she said.
Mauro frowned. “Please proceed.”
She brushed the soil into the cup. Before leaving, she placed the cup beside the plant.
By afternoon the plant had lifted one leaf. No one entered this in the maintenance record.
At 14:48, the municipality sent an automatic message to all applicants.
Dear user, your dignity is important to us. Due to high demand, dignity services may experience delays. Please do not submit duplicate dignity requests.
No one in the corridor laughed.
The chair, however, made a sound. One dry click in the left back leg.
Anita heard it as agreement.
She wrote the click down on a blank page. She did not know why. Perhaps every revolution begins as bad filing.
At 15:02 a new officer sat at Desk Three. He watered the plant, restarted the terminal, and opened Anita’s file.
Name: Anita Ricci.
Status: present, pending validation.
Notes: formerly authorized to process human remainder.
The new officer asked the first question required by the procedure.
“Do you have proof that you exist?”
Anita looked at the chair.
The chair did not answer.
It was waiting.
About the writer:
Gabriele Micozzi is an Italian writer and essayist based between the Marche and Rome. His work moves through systemic horror, civic and ecological poetry, and experimental forms. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Asymptote, Strange Horizons, American Poetry Journal, Heavy Feather Review, Space and Time Magazine, The Ecological Citizen, Ballast Journal, and other venues.
Image: Siete in tanti e io sono uno solo. Tornate domani. (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2026. Public domain via Midjourney AI.
Other work by and about Gabriele Micozzi available at O:JA&L:
Poetry: All forms & style||Gabriele Micozzi|”Inventory of the Grandmothers Who Stayed”
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
The O:JA&L Free Presses Masters Series
The O:JA&L Free Presses Masters Series (from OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters) gathers acclaimed writers for concise, downloadable chapbooks that pair fresh work with candid reflections on craft. Each installment—often framed by an interview with an associate editor—opens a window onto how masters of poetry, prose poetry, flash fiction, and related hybrid forms build voice, compression, and surprise. Designed as a reader’s invitation and a writer’s toolbox, the series celebrates literary art that moves fast, cuts deep, and lingers long after the last line.
Click on the titles below to explore or download the free PDF chapbooks.
Prose Poetry and Flash Discourse
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Brian Clements on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Mark Budman on Flash Fiction & Nonfiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Ray Gonzalez on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series:
Michael Martone on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series:
Roberta Allen on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series:
Peter Conners on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Maxine Chernoff on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Pedro Ponce on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Kent Dixon on Flash Fiction & Nonfiction
With an interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Tom Hazuka on Flash Fiction
With an interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
MIixed Forms: Haibun, Haiga, & Tanka Prose
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Roberta Beary on Haibun
With an interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
Experimental Discourse
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Jim Meirose on Experimental Discourse
With an interview by Associate Editor Warwick Newnham
Poetry: All forms & styles
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Poetry from Bruce McRae
With an Interview by Associate Editor Jeff Streeby
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series:
Poetry from Richard Widerkehr
With an Interview by Associate Editor Jeff Streeby
The Dally Post Press Masters Series:
Rod Miller on Cowboy Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Jeff Streeby
More titles in press
