Four Desks, One Unlicensed Machine

What is currently standing in this city for no better reason than that nobody has troubled to push it over:

A line on the Guild Hall’s apprentice-roll. No master. No fee. No indenture anyone can find. The roll-keeper won’t strike it. Her reasoning: absence is not cause. Correct, as far as it goes.

Sevi Almery’s half of an estate, upright for a year on the simple fact that no better claim ever arrived to knock it down.

A chandler’s seat, held by a man whose line the Archive can’t trace and nobody better placed has bothered to dispute.

A mending trade that never went on any roll at all, because three households’ paid, witnessed custom outweighs a book that would only have opened after the street had already decided.

A girl at the Arcade’s edge, stitching a stranger’s boot. No papers. The leather isn’t asking for any, and neither, today, is the man wearing it.

A desk at the Divan that has run this exact instrument for twenty-two years and only this week found a name for it. He calls it discretion. The roll-keeper calls it absence of cause. The Archive declined to call it anything at all, which is, now I think of it, also a way of calling it something.

A corner in the New Quarter with my name on it. I never asked for it. Nobody has yet shown cause to take it back either.

Seven entries. One instrument, running unlicensed under at least four desks that I know of.

I was going to count how many more. Decided against it. Some things are better left standing on nothing in particular.

—P.