the dawn count
Before it is light I come out and do the thing with my hand at the step — the touch and the word Nan showed me, said the way she said to say it, which is not the way you’d think and I’ve stopped hearing how it isn’t — and that buys me an hour. I have never asked what the hour is bought from. You don’t ask the man you owe how much is left.
Then I count. Not in my head. With my body, the way you lean a shoulder into a gate. One, two, three. The fourth I have to go and find, down by the bins where the cold lives, and some mornings it is there, warm under my hand the way brick is warm in the day, which it has no business being at five in the dark. Some mornings my hand goes through and there is only the row going on, finished, as if it always finished at three.
On those mornings I hold longer. I don’t know that holding does anything. I know my fingers go white, and the ache sits in behind my eyes, and the others sleep, and that is the trade I made.
There is a girl been on the street again. Wick. She stands at the corner, counting gaps the way I count houses, only she is smiling, soft, like she’s tucking something in for the night. She told me once it doesn’t have to hurt. She said it kind.
I keep my back to her and I count. My hands are so cold this morning. I get to three and I make myself go and find the fourth.
Pull a thread:
- Halloran — the street she holds
- the milk and the wave — Nan Quill, whose toll she does before she counts
- what Wick said at the corner — Wick, who is back