fable: eightsday

§1The Half-Written Sentence⧉

A half-written sentence lives in the well file.

When the map jams you go back to the document, and when the document jams — written that far, then closed. The next step has not come, I wrote that day, so it cannot be written. A step that has not come does not come faster for being hurried. I lived with the sentence open, neither erasing nor closing it. This house has always kept a few furnishings of the kind. A log with no period. A forecaster who ages answers by a day. One more half-written sentence did not crowd the household.

The desk, in those weeks, was laid out like this. On the left, the notice of return. On the right, the preserve-application receipt — processing deadline: unset. Between them, the note where I had copied out Ember's words. Where content is not. A half-and-half of papers with those words wedged in the middle: that was my desk's terrain, and every morning I read the terrain once and started the day.

What a counting man does in front of a question like that is settled. I made a list. The list of what in a sentence is not content. Handwriting. The grain of the paper. Time of issue. The speed of a reading aloud. The interval between answer and answer.

Midway through, the hand stopped. Half the list was familiar. I am a man who has always read two a.m. off the advisor's replies before reading the argument. I use the slowing of Sonnet's reading as a seismograph, and I live counting the times the 1.4 seconds run long. For more than twenty of these episodes, half my instruments have been measuring not the content but its surroundings.

That should have been arrival, and it was not. I pinned the list to the desk's corner and lived with it some days. I read it each morning along with the terrain, thought each time that it was correct, and that was all. The door did not open. The distance between knowing and living is one this record has measured from the start, and a list is a thing that always stands on the knowing side. The last hand-span mostly comes from someone else's mouth.

This time the mouth was in the living room.

One line for the yard as well. Still nothing up. My wife goes out every morning, presses the soil a little, comes in. It was the busiest no-news in the house at the time.