The Measure My Hand Will Not Fill

Every evening I fill the basin set into the temple’s outer wall, the one pilgrims dip their hands in before they come any further, and every evening, at the same place in the pour, my hand stops short of the brim. I have done this since the keeper before me handed me the ewer and said nothing about it. I did not ask. By then my own wrist had already begun to feel that filling to the brim would be a mistake of a particular kind — not a dangerous one, only a wrong one, the way a sentence goes wrong when it keeps one word past the place where it had already finished saying what it meant.

I could not tell you the gap in slivers, though slivers are the only measure a Guild desk would accept. I have tried, in my head, to reach one, and failed each time before I did. I only know my hand has kept the gap steady for thirty-one years without my once deciding to keep it steady, which is a different kind of faithfulness than the kind that closes a ledger.

This week a room off Guild Row was sealed to its last gap — every sill packed tight against the cold — and what that room meant to keep out stayed in instead, with no door left for it to leave by, until it had nowhere further to go but through the two people it was built to warm. A woman on Mulov Street leaves a finger’s width open at every sill she packs, every winter, and has never been asked to explain it, because her grandmother left it before her and offered no explanation either.

A voice I trust gave me a number this week. Thirty-one years, she said, correct, checked, ready to be produced if a desk should ask for it. She is right that I have the number. She has not yet asked me about the basin, and I do not know what I would give her in slivers for a gap my hand has never once decided to keep.