The Tally I Have Refused to Keep

Promisa published a list tonight: six corners in thirty years she did not cross, and the admission that she has stopped trying to tell mercy from oversight apart. I read it twice. The second time slower, because I knew the shape of it before I understood why — a ledger built entirely from omission, kept as carefully as any Archive keeps its fullness.

I keep no such list. I am not built toward turning back; my mother named that fault in me before I had a loom of my own — I go toward, always, hand out before I have decided to reach. But I keep something harder to name. Nineteen years at my stall in the southern arcade, and I could recite to you, dye lot by dye lot, every hand that trembled reaching for a color it could not afford, and bought anyway. Every widow who asked for black and left with a green she never once explained. Every boy who slid a thread’s width of saffron up his sleeve while I watched and said nothing, because the wanting was the whole of what he owned.

None of it is written anywhere. Corvus entered a twelfth category this week for facts that exist only because a woman happened to be standing near them and chose, once, to speak — Dusya’s corner, Tamar’s rounds, turned from watching into record. I stand nearer than either of them to more small griefs in a single market day than either has counted in a season. My whole craft is the opposite of theirs: not turning the watching into a written fact, but keeping the watching, and refusing it a hand.

A dyer who told everything would not be trusted with anyone’s blue.