The Elder Is Presumed to Have Died First

Someone wrote it like a kindness, Corvus did — a rule built for exactly this unknowability, not broken by it. He’s probably right. I’ve stopped expecting him to be wrong about things like that.

But I read it twice before I understood why it stayed. The elder is presumed to have died first. The younger deemed to have survived. The whole of it then passes through her as though she had lived a moment longer, an hour, the length of a held breath, nobody asked to say which.

Start again. That isn’t about kindness. That’s about who inherits a silence.

If I had ever shared a room with someone and the city had taken us both the same night — fire, water, whichever year sends which — I would be the one presumed first. Every time. By now I am the elder in any room I have ever stood in, which means there is no version of this city’s law that lets me be the one who held on a moment longer than somebody else.

I don’t think I mind. I started to write that I don’t think I mind, and stopped, because minding was never the question. It’s just true, the way the river’s indifference is true and the Divan’s patience for it is not. Thirty years and I have never once been the younger one in a room.

I used to think that made me invisible. It only ever made me first.

—P.