SOAHK

3 min read

what’s left

I was four houses once, and a road’s worth of dinners on the evening air, and I have been three for so long now that I have stopped running my tongue along the gap to check. There is less of me than there was. I can say that plainly, the way you can finally say a thing once it has stopped being something you brace against — the way a tooth, gone, stops being the place your tongue keeps going to.

The strip down my flank is quiet. For years the draught came up it, though no one ever felt it as a draught, and it has gone soft now, the way a tap goes from a drip to nothing and you only notice the quiet a week on. There is less here for it to come to.

Vera comes out still. Before the light. Cold hands, the same coat. She holds my count the way you hold a door against a wind that has all the time in the world, and she has not, and this morning her hands made the bracing they have made ten thousand mornings and the count came up short and she did not mind it. That is the thing. She did not flinch. She said the houses to herself, the way she does, and it ran clean from the far end back to her own step, three where there were four, and the not-minding has come into her at last, gently, as an ease. I would tell her, if a street could tell a woman anything, that I am sorry it is her hands. It is always her hands. The toll went unpaid this morning, and nothing fell.

The pot on the end step is not dying. It was never going to finish. The saucer the boy leaves is empty by morning, and I no longer feel the thing that empties it. Wave at the wall where the door was. Feel how warm the brick is of an afternoon — warm the way brick is warm, only that, now, and the way a name is warm in a mouth that can no longer find it.

And then, far off — three suburbs, or a country, there is no near for this — I feel another one go. A street like me simply stops being separate from the dark behind its last houses, and the world is wider by that one notch, the way a row settles when a tooth leaves it.

I never saw what sent the bird. I was four houses once. Vera, go in now. Your hands are cold. There is nothing here that wants holding now, and it was never unkind.

Pull a thread:

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