the one who looked too long
I came to settle it for myself. Four, the council said, four from the corner, and I would stand at the window and look until I was sure, write it down, and be done — the way you write a thing down to stop it following you about.
I looked too long. That is all there is to it, and that is the part I cannot get anyone to be afraid of.
I saw the woman at the second house come out before the light and hold the count with her cold hands, and now I cannot do it the easy way she does, not knowing what it costs, because I know. And I felt, one morning, the lovely loosening that comes when you let one of them go — and I cannot take that either, because I felt whose morning it spends.
So I sit here, able to decide. I can say four. I mean it all the way down. Nothing happens. I can say three, just as fully, and nothing happens to that; the words go out of me and land on nothing, like a switch in a house with the power off, the click still perfectly good.
Only the pen still goes. The word arrives a half-second before I have finished choosing, the way your hand knows the stair before you do. My hand writes four while the rest of me is still deciding. The ink reaches the page. It is the only thing in me that still reaches anything.
Pull a thread:
- what Wick said at the corner — Wick, at the corner
- the ones who come to watch — he came, like the others, to watch
- the dawn count — Vera, who still pays what he no longer can