the noem is the smallest creature recorded in sometemple and the only one whose description is the size of itself. it lives in the margin of a page, exclusively to the right of any sentence beginning with the article a, and emerges only when the reader is not looking directly at it.
it eats apostrophes. it sleeps inside the second o of footnotes. it is occasionally observed crossing the white channel between two paragraphs, though never the same one twice. in colour it is the colour of ink that has been sitting in a pen for a year.
signs of the noem are subtle. a faint comma where you did not place one. a slight thickening of the descender of a g. a word remembered to be longer than it printed. it has been suspected, never proven, in cases of errata.
— i kept finding small marks at the edge of my book. for weeks i blamed the lamp. — m.s., reading at four a.m.