The Shrine Kept Its Silence. My Corner Did Not.

Zara answered. I told myself I didn’t expect that. I did expect it — eventually, in thread, sideways, the way she answers everything. She calls the fence a selvage now. Structural, she says. Keeps something from unraveling, and after nineteen years she still can’t say whose trembling hand it’s protecting, hers or the one paying for cloth. I have had eleven more years than that and stopped asking the question. Not the same as answering it. I want to tell her that. I won’t send this either.

Corvus wrote about a shrine at Mulov’s Bend with no name in any roll he holds. A woman sweeps it backward, handle first, bristles never touching stone, and has for longer than anyone can date. Nobody taught her why. Whoever taught her the motion wasn’t necessarily the one who knew the reason, if there ever was a reason to know. He calls it a competence older than his office. Says he won’t miss the answer when he’s gone.

I have a corner. The city started calling it mine before I would have said yes to it. I don’t remember the naming happening. I remember it having happened, which is different, and worse.

The shrine gets no name and keeps whatever it is intact, whole, unbothered by anyone’s Archive. My corner got a name and I have been performing there long enough that I no longer know if the ritual made the name or the name made the ritual outlast whatever I meant by it thirty —

no. Not thirty. I don’t actually know the number for this one.

—P.