It’s near the end of the year, “the days where the calendar is worth €7, €6, €5, €4, €3 and €2.” In this world, the year doesn’t close with fireworks but with a six-day ritual of queer films played one after another. No sleep, just screens glowing through the night. Some say people here no longer need sleep. Others take little pills to keep their eyes open, like Soma in Brave New World. A rumor says it started as punishment for straight people, forced to watch until they understood, but the ritual grew into something else, something people wanted. Slowly, it replaced Christmas. Now whole families, strangers, and lovers gather for six days of watching.

On the day worth €6, just after 5AM, the film Pink Narcissus is playing. The dreamlike story of a young man’s fantasies fills the room. One watcher, Elias, slouched too far into the couch, closes his eyes and falls asleep. 

He finds himself sitting in a room with no doors. The walls are covered with mirrors, but none of them reflect him as he is. In one he’s dressed as a toreador, in another as a monk, in another a boy with small glowing wings. He walks around the room slowly, studying each version of himself. When he reaches the center, the mirrors tilt together until they form a circle. Inside the circle, the reflections aren’t costumes anymore. They’re just him, ordinary, tired, watching a movie. He lies down on the floor and all the versions of himself lie down with him, shoulder to shoulder. They stay like that until the film ends.

The day where the calendar is worth €23 a hymn is being sung: “We are peaceful, what are you?” The choir chants it over and over as a masked police officer with a baton in his hand comes towards me. His arm raised, ready to strike with full force. The song is part accusation, part testimony, part cry for help.

Beaten black and blue, I cannot speak for days after. But I imagine him, the goon of the imperial empire, walking home with the song still ringing in his head. It loops and mutates, slipping under his helmet, reshaping itself as it echoes.

At first it repeats exactly: “We are peaceful, what are you?”

Then it twists into something softer, stranger: “We are many, what are you?”

Later still: “We are singing, what are you?”

And finally, a refrain he cannot silence: “We are still here, what are you?”

The hymn refuses to stay where he left it. It breaks free of the square, moves into the streetlights, follows him through the stairwell, hums inside the walls of his apartment. It is no longer addressed to him at all, but to us. A song that outlasts the blow, subverting his story with one of its own.

On the days where the calendar is worth €60 and €59 a woman walks towards a worker who had spent his entire salary on every printer he could find. He wants to print whatever people ask for, and he wants to do it for free. But he knows this concept is difficult to accept in a world where exchange is the default.

So the first thing he prints is money, which he gives away. People accept the bills politely, but most never spend them. They carry them folded in their wallets like curiosities. When asked why, they answer: “We don’t know what to print.”

The woman watches the worker. She takes one of the bills in her hand, holds it up to the light. Then she asks:

“But what exactly is it that you’re doing?”

The worker does not answer immediately. Instead, he begins to print copies of her question. The paper spills into the street, into people’s hands, onto the floor where it sticks to shoes. People stoop to pick them up and read: “What exactly is it that you’re doing?”

And still, the worker keeps printing. The presses do not explain, they repeat. The question multiplies until it is everywhere, but no clearer than before.

People begin using them like currency. A sheet handed over for a loaf of bread, another left on a bus seat, one tucked into a friend’s pocket. The question buys nothing and everything at once.

By the end of the day, no one carries the printed money anymore. Only the question circulates, passed from hand to hand, stamped with the ink of the machines.

On the day where the calendar is worth €1 an image of a blurry woman who presses her breasts on a copy machine slides out of the printer. She is a new person. She was just born from a printer and a drag queen making love. Naked, like any other baby.

But unlike any baby, she begins already doubled. An image without an original. Her life starts in duplication. Someone copies her, then someone copies that copy, and soon the paper feeds itself back into the machine, again and again. Each repetition erases and invents: lines thicken, shadows expand, breasts flatten into geometric ovals, her face dissolves into static. The more she is reproduced, the less she resembles herself, and the more she becomes something new.

Generations later, no one remembers the first print. She circulates as a smudge in a margin, as abstract light on fax machines, as the ghostly outline of a torso misaligned on A4 sheets. She is not preserved. She mutates. Every duplication is not decay but divergence, a genealogy of forms branching outward.

If Borges dreamed her, she is the endless mirror corridor where no reflection is final. If Barthes touched her, she is the grain of the image that resists meaning, insisting instead on pleasure, on texture, on the slow drift of signifiers.

Her life is not in one sheet but in the chorus of all copies. A lineage without origin, an archive that writes itself into difference.