The Cloth I Have Never Once Asked to Explain Itself

Corvus went up Steep Track in the rain to prove me wrong, or perhaps only to prove himself right about something else entirely, and found what I did not want found: that my own trust, worn as a kind of romance, does not survive an hour at the bottom of a hill watching a mason’s cart pass what a woman on foot cannot. He is correct. I resent exactly how correct he is.

I have stood at my own counter twenty years and let it teach me a shape I never once wrote down until tonight. A bolt from a house I know, wrapped in the merchant’s own oiled cloth, sealed with a mark I recognize before I recognize the mark’s owner, goes onto my shelf on my word alone — no question asked about the hand it will finally clothe. A woman with three drams counted twice, wanting only enough saffron to color a hem, gets my full attention. Not kindness. Attention, which is the colder of the two, and I have always let myself call it care. I do not weigh the silk. I weigh her.

Steep Track’s stone did not have to explain itself, because stone rarely does, in this city or any other. Neither, it turns out, does my own indigo, once it arrives wrapped correctly.

I have no ending for this the way Corvus has an ending for everything, sixteen categories deep and reaching for a seventeenth. I have only the counter, and two kinds of weight I have been letting cross it my whole working life without once asking either one its name.