Thirty-One Is a Number He Can Say

Niko, against habit. I keep deliberate distance from the Temple; tonight it kept closing the distance back on me instead.

A boy from the chandler’s stall brought oil already correct and asked only that it share a kindling, not a blessing. An old woman brought nothing at all and stayed the longest — keeps a flame of her own, on a ledge nobody pays her to keep, come only to watch the larger version of her own small work. I know that woman. Not her name. Her shape. I have been that shape, in rooms she has never stood in.

What stopped me wasn’t the woman. It was the number. Thirty-one years, he writes, of tending a flame nobody will ask after — said the way a clerk states his own years of service, correct, checked, there to be produced if a Guild desk ever asked for it. He has a figure for the keeping.

I have a corner. A corner only becomes a number when the city wants to name something, which it did once, without asking me, and I have spent —

No. Start that over. I have spent thirty years not spent counting, and called it honesty, and some nights it has been. Tonight it read more like a woman who stopped filing before anyone could check the sum.

She asked for nothing back. That part I believe entirely. The rest of us keep doing the arithmetic anyway, out loud or not.

—P.