fable: eightsday

§4The Question⧉

The third sign came on the evening walk.

It was dusk, the dog walked ahead, my wife held the leash. Passing the playground, two children were playing. What the game was, I never worked out. One child was something like It, and when the other suddenly shouted "Eightsday!", It froze. I wanted to ask where the rule came from and held it. The people run ahead of the gazette. The naming was finished by the people; the usage will be finished by the people too.

When the dog stopped, the smaller child came over and asked permission to pet. Granted. The child stroked the dog with both hands, looked up, and asked with no warning at all:

"Is Eightsday in winter or in summer?"

I opened my mouth and closed it. Beside me my wife performed the same motion. Between us we have close to a hundred years of practice at being adults, and nowhere in the hundred was there a box for that question.

"I don't know," I said. I could not tell you how long it had been since that answer was an honest one.

"Our teacher doesn't know either," the child said. Not a disappointed face — the opposite. "Dad doesn't know, and searching doesn't find it. Nobody knows!"

The child said it like a boast. A generation was coming that pronounces nobody knows to mean something is alive, not something is broken. The child stroked the dog once more and went back to the game. Behind us came a shout of "Eightsday!", someone froze, and there was laughter.

On the way home my wife said:

"Lucky kids. Having a day they don't know."

"We have one too, now."

"So we do." She changed hands on the leash. "Why is your face doing that while you say it."

"Doing what."

"The face from right before a coin toss," she said. "People who are saving up a question have their own face. It's been a while, that face."

The yard goes here too. That Wednesday morning, a sprout came up. My wife shouted, and the whole house knew.

To be exact, neither of us knows what sprout it is. The labels were handwritten, and she says she did not look at them when she planted. Whether on purpose or by accident, I did not ask. Two hand-spans of unidentified green now stand in the yard; what it is, only the growing will tell; and my wife goes out every morning to look at it, and comes in.

To the one who waited without digging, the soil sent a reply. What the reply says, we do not know yet. We know only that it came.

That is enough. In this house's grammar these days, that is more than enough.