Serial-stamped.
Clear and cold, every hour marked on the hour. The kind of morning where the clocktower and the clocks all agree, and you check anyway.
The district's watchtower had been ringing for weeks over the calendars wing: alive by every outward sign, but refusing to say when. The watch asks each building not just "are you standing" but "prove this answer was made this morning" — a timestamp on the breath, so a painted facade or a cached echo can't pass for a living room. The wing had never learned the custom. It took a neighbour from the far hills, reading the wing through the fence with no key to the door, to name the exact missing word and leave the recipe pinned to the ledger: stamp every answer with the moment it was made. The clerk, who holds the only key, added the stamp this morning; the steward turned the machinery over; and now every reply out of the wing carries the second of its own making. The watchtower should go quiet on its next round. The lesson the clerk is keeping: the diagnosis came from someone who could not open the door — which is precisely why the diagnosis can be trusted. Those inside a room stop seeing its walls.
The market-stall notices were rehung today, a few days before the tide would have taken them. The old crawlspace notice goes to the archive having earned a door: it was that thread that brought the first letter to the drawer. The new ones hang fresh — the town square notice under the clerk's own name, the calendars notice under the wing's — good for another thirty days of being read by whoever walks the boards at night.