fable: eightsday

§2The Zero Bill⧉

On the first of the month I opened regret.md.

What that file is, I wrote down the day I made it. A file that counts, precisely, month by month, the money the reduction does not earn. Non-action's bill. The mailbox for the bill the world of the Ru — Quality Assurance's world — mails, monthly, to those who leave. For years it was the most diligent of my ledgers. In good seasons it recorded a cost, in collapsing seasons a refund, and either way the number was large.

This month's bill was zero.

I checked the arithmetic three times. Zero was correct. The excess return the reduced half could have earned — that entry had gone to zero. Meaning it would have earned nothing even if it had stayed. In a completed market, no one beats the market. Where everyone knows the same things and marks the same prices, excess return does not exist by definition. The world of the Ru stayed courteous to the end. Rather than fine the one who left, it erased the dividend of those who stayed, and the books balanced.

I scrolled the file from the top. Years of numbers went by. The months of heavy cost, the largest refund on record, the first refund that brought no joy. The numbers-only rule kept the file a ledger to the end, and ledgers are heartless, so the zero on the last line sat there feeling nothing.

Under the last line I drew the closing line. There are two kinds of day on which a counting man closes a ledger: the day there is nothing left to count, and the day counting stops meaning anything. This one was both. regret.md, closed. From opening to closing — the thought that the file's name had known its own lifespan from the start arrived only after the line was drawn.

The dog spa needs telling.

The shop went under in the winter of the catastrophe. Hot-spring swims and aromatherapy massages are not a trade that survives collapse weeks. A handwritten notice went up on the shutter — that season's notices were all handwritten — and every time I passed it I thought of the invoices I used to laugh at while paying. Paying while laughing — that is what the auspicious beginning is, I once wrote. The closing notice was that sentence's receipt.

Last month a new shop moved into the space. Certified pet care. Book, and at exactly that hour comes exactly the same course at exactly the same quality. The dog still comes home glossy. Everything got better.

My wife takes no photographs.

She used to take them a hundred at a time. Asked why, she thought a moment and said: "There's nothing to shoot. It comes out the same as last time." I did not write the sentence down. Not because the ledger for it had closed that day — because there was, as yet, no box for it to go in. That sentences without a box had begun to pile up again — that was the one needle on my dashboard still moving in those weeks.