Episodul 277 · Thin

Maxim brought the dogs home at four, in the van from the center.

Lucky came through the door first and went straight to Soles and stopped, a step away, and smelled the air around his chest for a long time with his ears flat. Then he lay down across Soles’s feet and did not move again. Mina did a full circuit of the kitchen, ate something off the floor that Tesa had dropped on purpose, and climbed into Soles’s lap as if she had been gone a year.

He could not lift her. He found that out when he tried. She weighed what she had always weighed, and his arms did not care.

Thin, he thought. That’s the word. Like a coat worn through at the elbows.

He had a washer in his coat pocket. He had pocketed one at the factory and never put it back, and carried it since the way some men carry a coin. He took it out now, while the others were busy, and held it at eye height over his open palm, and let go.

In the factory the washer had turned in the air slowly enough for him to see its edge and correct his hand. He reached for that now. The extra moment came.

It came late, and short. The washer was already halfway down when the room slowed, and the room did not slow much. He closed his hand and the washer hit the heel of it and bounced onto the floor and rolled under the stove.

Nobody had seen. Mina had. She went after it.

He sat with his empty hand open on his knee and understood that this was going to be how it was now. Not gone. Thinner. The doctor had said weeks for the hole. Nobody had said anything about the other thing, because nobody knew it was there.

Krista sat down beside him and took his wrist.

She had done it every hour since the chamber. Two fingers on the inside, eyes on the clock over the stove, lips moving. He let her. She finished counting, and wrote the number on the back of her hand with a pen, beside the others.

Then she did not let go.

She sat holding his wrist and looking at him, not at his face, at all of him, the way she looked at a page she meant to copy. A long time. Long enough that Tesa, at the sink, turned round.

— Krista, Tesa said.

Krista let go so fast her chair scraped.

— I wasn’t finished, she said. She looked at her own hand. I don’t know what I was waiting for. I had the number.

She got up and went to the window and stood there with her back to them.

At the sink Tesa washed the same cup for the third time. She had not said a word all afternoon about the thing nobody had taken from her.

At the back door Maxim was fighting the step. It had iced over again in the afternoon, the one by the yard, where Mina always slipped. He went out with a board from the shed and laid it across the ice from the sill to the dry flagstone, and kicked one end level, and stood back.

— There, he said. Now she can cross.

Then he stopped, with his hands still out, and looked at the board as if somebody else had put it there.

— I didn’t think about that, he said. I just knew where it went.

Nobody said anything. Tesa turned the tap off.

Maxim came in and sat down and took the delivery slip out of his pocket and smoothed it on the table. Nineteen names. Nineteen streets.

— I’m going round them tomorrow, he said. By the street. Knocking. He folded it again. If I can’t know them by their faces, I’ll know them by their doors.

Soles waited until it was dark and the others were upstairs. Then he took the pale blade out of his coat and sat at the kitchen table with it in his left hand and the dark one hanging from his right wrist, and called them down.

He did not explain. He asked them to sit. They sat, Krista and Maxim across the table from him, and Tesa leaning in the doorway with her bandaged hand against her chest.

He looked at them with the pale blade.

Threads. Tesa’s, the one she had always had, pulled taut. Krista’s, where the old one had gone slack and vanished at the slit: a new one, thin, very tight. Maxim’s, the same. New. Thin. Working already.

He had put those there. He could see it, the way you can see your own handwriting on somebody else’s letter.

And with the dark blade on his wrist, he could feel something else. Not a pull. A possibility. The thread was right there. He could reach it without touching either of them, without a wound. He could cut it the way you cut a string on a parcel, and whatever he had put into them would go back where it came from.

He did not know if that was mercy. He did not know if it was the same thing he had done at the slit, only slower.

He put the pale blade down on the table.

— There’s something new in each of you, he said. In you two. Not in Tesa. I put it there, last night. I didn’t choose it. I don’t know whose it is.

— Can you take it out? Maxim said.

— I think so.

— And if you did. Would I get him back? Ordric.

— No. That one’s gone.

Maxim nodded slowly, as if he had known and needed to hear it said.

Krista looked at the blades on the table for a long time.

— Don’t, she said. Not tonight. Not because you’re afraid of it.

Soles nodded.

When they had gone up he took the pale blade and put it in the drawer with the spoons, at the far end of the kitchen from the stove, and stood with his hand on the drawer.

Never both again. Not unless the other way is worse than anything I can see.

Then he lay down on the floor by the stove, where the dogs were, and slept.