MISQUAH — The smoke left Wednesday without collecting its things, and the town has spent the week finding them. This is an accounting, as complete as press time allows, of what the borrowed sky left behind.

At the library: one rung, in ink, on the animal ladder — the first permanent rung in the ladder’s history, added during the three days the record class spent entirely indoors, and confirmed straight by telephone, twice, by Mrs. Aune. Megan Tollefson reports the pencil rungs below it now look “like drafts,” and that the children have begun treating the ink rung as a monument, which, the record will show, it is.

At the fire hall: one oak chair, still. The chair claimed six weeks early under “elevated operational tempo” remains in residence despite the tempo having, by any honest measure, de-elevated. The department’s position is that the wind could turn again. The city’s position is on file. The chair’s position is by the turnout rack, and it looks comfortable there, which both sides privately regard as the real problem.

At the fair office: three photographs of a red sun, titled “July,” “July (Evening),” and “Also July,” entered in open-class photography and awaiting judging on the nineteenth. The superintendent notes that in forty years of fair photography the sun has been entered many times, “but never before as the subject, the lighting, and the villain at once.”

At the Daybreak: one napkin, bearing the coffee figure Pat Reinholt recorded during the week nobody was counting, now taped to the register at eye level, where it functions as a plaque. Elsewhere: a plate of bars in transit between Third Street porches on a schedule both households deny exists; a burn ban, still in force until the county says otherwise; and, on the wall of the gym, a rumor of free reverb the band is reportedly reluctant to give back. The sky itself has been returned to its owners, who are advised it was appreciated, and that the town, on the whole, prefers its own.