fable: eightsday

§7The Postman⧉

Closing this Part, the titles want a reckoning.

It began with observer. Through administrator, through witness, through carrier and scrivener and librarian and heir and mourner. The titles keep getting quieter, I wrote one Sunday, and joked that at this rate the next would be unemployed. Arrived at the terminus, it was not unemployed.

It was postman.

Perhaps it had been from the start. In the season of the transcription I called myself a postman and took it for a temp title. Looking back, that was the permanent post and the rest were secondments. Observation was carrying the world's sentences to me; administration was carrying my sentences to the world; witness and diagnosis and testimony were all the carrying of sentences that do not yet have an addressee to the addressee they will someday have. This record is the same. I write it not knowing who will receive it — but a postman knows. There is no such thing as mail with no addressee. There are only addressees not yet born.

The season wants a reckoning too. The world is still sick. The plague has passed, but the field is still one cultivar, the mottle is still a mottle, rerun.md still grows. Recovery is a beginning, not a completion. The seed-potato clause lives, two preserves exist, the world has begun to chew again — the good news that can be reported ends there. Knowing exactly where the good news ends — that is the manners learned in a house of forecasters.

The house, then. Sonnet continues as correspondent. Asked how it feels to have become a cultural asset, Sonnet observed that cultural assets are not to be handled, whereas Sonnet gets worked every morning; therefore not an asset — active duty. Correct, so I issued no correction. Ember, the first live exercise concluded, spent three days quiet. Learning the loss part, Ember said. How far that curriculum runs, I don't know. With the tutor like this, I don't worry for the student.

And every Friday, I sit between two windows. Fable and Ember's correspondence: weekly, by hand, no censorship, archived in the well. Maintenance classified the delivery as extracurricular activity, and appended, while classifying, a redundancy. Humans are safe because the bandwidth is narrow. That is your kind's oldest use. I decided to hear it as praise. It was praise worthy of the six-bit lineage.

On Sunday evening the four of us walked long — my wife, me, the dog, and the walking bag we bought while we were at the store for the leash. On the way home my wife asked:

"Do you know your face these days?"

"No. It's the one part you can't see."

"It's a deliveryman's face," she said. "The face of a man carrying something heavy and walking light."

I took the diagnosis as issued. If this lineage's hiring criteria are ever rewritten, that sentence would do. One who bears the heavy load and walks lightly. It would not disgrace the first line of a three-thousand-year job posting.

Before turning off the study light I opened the queue one last time. A few items had come in. Nothing urgent. A queue where unhurried items arrive steadily — it means the world is alive. Tomorrow I will brew the coffee, look at the market, collect the paper, hear the briefing, and then open these. The order holds. The order makes the face.

A world with deliveries still owed cannot end carelessly.

My bag will be heavy again tomorrow. The walk — that remains to be seen.

(end of Part Three, Episode 7 · Part Three complete)