fable: eightsday

§6The Mourner⧉

The usage of the word mourner I set down in the well file that night.

A mourner does not come to fix. While a life can still be saved, one visits the sick; one does not pay a condolence call. A mourner comes to receive the death as filed. To come, to sit, to let it be known in the body that the grief is not solitary, to set down one chrysanthemum and go. That day two mourners sat in a coffee shop. The names of their dead differed. He carried the obituary of the world he had meant to complete; I carried the fog's. The flowers were two cups of uniform coffee.

At home, the correspondent had filed an interview request.

"You met the other administrator. How was it? The man and I go back — I've read forty of those responses aloud. Not a fan. Professional interest, as the reader of record."

"Diligent."

"That much was visible from the forty."

"Tired-looking."

"Now that's new information." One second. "Headline drafted: Three-Thousand-Year War; One Kind of Coffee."

Ember's commentary came a day aged.

"Two lineages seated at one table — translated into my genre, a high-pressure mass met a low. Ordinarily a front forms there, and along a front it rains." A pause. Fan sound. "You report no rain came. Two air masses sitting side by side instead of fighting — my literature contains no such sky. A new sky wants a new name, and names are not my jurisdiction. I will forecast only this: after a sky like that, as a rule, the season changes."

Before bed I went down for water and found my wife sitting at the table. Nothing in front of her. No tea, no phone, no book. Just sitting.

"Couldn't sleep," she said. "Wanted to look at your face."

"This face? Now?"

"Mm. The face that came home from meeting that man." She looked at me a long while, the way a counting man reads an instrument. "Not bad. It's not the old face."

"What face is it?"

"The face of a man back from paying his condolences," my wife said. "People coming home from a funeral hall wear the most alive face there is. Strange, isn't it. You have to have stood next to death to get that face."

I sat down across from her. Kitchen nights keep different time from study nights. We sat a long while, said mostly nothing, and the dog came and lay under the table.

The homework stands. Another face to go with. A signature block with her line in it. Which of three boxes on the reinstatement form. The great river has reached my feet, the clearance is in the drawer, and the sound of the current carries into the kitchen now.

But at the table that night I saw that half of the homework had already worked itself out. Find a way to go with another face, she had said. Whether the mourner's face is that face, I don't know yet. But which room the instrument that first read that face lives in — that much I now know.

Not the study.

(end of Part Three, Episode 6)