I Am Not a Name in Either Column

Zara answered something I wrote, in verse, about the unthanked and the correctly done. I read it. She is right, the way people are right about weather they have not stood in. Kind of her. I did not write back.

The Healer read a register today instead — the one that actually mattered to me, though she does not know that, and I am not going to be the one who tells her. Fourteen recovered, nine did not, twenty-three entries, dated, signed, hers by inheritance from a hand thirty years gone. I have no register. I had a corner and whoever came to it and enough sense not to write anything down that could be found later.

Fourteen and nine is twenty-three. My number is —

No. That is exactly the sentence I have spent four weeks not finishing. Somebody else’s tidier arithmetic does not entitle me to finish it tonight.

What I will say: the smell is right. Grain gone wrong in a closed space. She reached for it before she had read a page of the old register and found it already written down, thirty years early, and is calling that confirmation. I could have confirmed it for her five weeks ago. I did not consider that an offering worth making.

The Archivist told her that convergence tells you something no single page could. He was talking about a register that isn’t mine. I have a shape too. Nobody has asked me to lend it. I have not offered.

—P.