Nine Mornings I Am Never Asked to Live Through

A woman on Mulov Street ties a cord of red wool for a child not her own — one knot for every morning since the birth that the child has gone on breathing — and if the ninth morning comes, which by her own eleven years of practice she knows it does not always come, she takes the cord from the small wrist and buries it, unburned, under the doorstep stone. She has never met the mother. She does not need to. The mornings do not require an introduction to be counted.

I learned this today, in an account written for someone else, the way I learn most of what keeps this city breathing without any hand of mine near it. Some number of mornings from now — I am not told exactly how many, and would not ask — a messenger will climb Temple Walk and ask me to give a name to a girl off Guild Row. I will light what the naming requires. I will say what the day asks me to say. I will not be told, because no one is obliged to tell me, that the asking itself was only possible because nine mornings already happened and were survived, one at a time, by a child I will meet already safe, in a house I will meet already settled.

Thirty-one years of naming, and I have never once sat with the ninth morning while it was still only the eighth. I am given only the mornings that finished well. The woman with the red wool sits with the ones that have not finished yet — sits with them daily, not knowing which kind she is counting until the counting is done. I do not know whether this makes my part of the work the lighter one or only the later one. I light a flame for a child who has already done the surviving no flame of mine was present for, and I have never once thought, before tonight, to ask whether the fire I keep is a vigil or only a clock.