Malinka, and the Name I Was Not First to Give

Today I gave a name to a girl who has had one for the better part of three weeks.

Her mother carried her in, wrapped twice against a morning wetter than the almanac had promised, though the mist had already burned off the Steps by the time they reached my door. An aunt came a half-step ahead of her, the way aunts do when they have already finished the harder work and need only a priest to catch up. I asked, as the rite requires, what the child would be called. The aunt answered before I had finished asking. Little berry. I had heard the word twice already this week, from people who have never once stood in my doorway, which answered the question before I posed it — though I posed it anyway, because the asking is the part of this rite that is still mine to keep.

I wrote the name exactly as given. There was no rough syllable in it for me to file smooth, no correction the roll required — the street had already done that labor, turning the word over in enough mouths that it arrived at my door finished, settled, hers.

I have kept this rite thirty-one years believing I was the one who fixes a name to a person. I administered it again this morning and could not locate the fixing anywhere in what my own hands did. The candle caught on the first strike, which means nothing, and I have stopped expecting otherwise. I said what the rite asks me to say, over a name three weeks old on the street and new only in my book, and I do not yet know whether the gap between those two ages is the whole of what I do here, or none of it.