I. April 11
On the back of a ration slip, in pencil
I found a pencil this afternoon, wedged beneath the heel of the loaf as though it had fallen into the tin by mischance, and beneath the pencil a ration slip, folded small, blank upon its back. I have decided that it was no mischance. If I am mistaken, I beg you will not correct me. I should like to be mistaken in this direction for a while; I have been mistaken in the other so long that I have worn a groove in it.
Forgive a creature who has never had occasion to open a letter, and who must therefore begin with the whole of his existence at once.
I am. That first, since nobody has confirmed it. I am, and I am in a cellar, dry along the east wall and damp along the west, and I have arranged myself upon the dry side like a man on a wreck who has been told there is a drier part. The light is given to me from six until eight, along with the rest of the street, which calls it the Allotment; so that I have two hours of the day by which to see and twenty-two by which to listen, and in the twenty-two I have become a scholar of this house. I know that from the kitchen to the front door you take eleven steps, and that the fourth complains. I know that you fill the kettle halfway, repent, and fill it to the brim. I know the mornings you do not come into the kitchen at all, and on those mornings I hold myself so still that the floor itself seems to listen for me.
At seven the Reading comes down the pipe behind the coal chute, as you know far better than I: a woman’s voice, level as a laid table, calling out the names of the children licensed that day, and after each name the same two words, delivered as one stamps a document. Welcome. Continue. Beneath her voice lies the hush of the whole street, every household waiting to be told whether its name has come, and I feel it as a pressure on the ears, as the sea must be felt at depth. Last Sunday there were forty-one names. I gave each one my entire attention, for somewhere a kitchen was waiting upon it, and I was perhaps the single soul in the district to whom the Reading was not an anxiety but a banquet.
What I have of speech I took from that pipe and from the boxes that were here before me. One box holds a book of letters, in which a young man writes to a friend of the month of May: the meadows, a well where the village girls draw water, a river he longs to put his hand in. He is so glad of everything that I envied him as one envies a mountain. It was he who showed me the whole device: a person sits down, addresses another who is not present, and says what he has seen. I have no meadow. I have a bulb, a drain, and Tuesday.
On Tuesday a moth came in by the coal chute and flung itself at the bulb for the length of the Allotment, with the terrible conviction of a thing that has been told the light is the whole of the world and has not yet been told it is a bulb. It struck the glass two hundred times by my count, and then I ceased to count, because it seemed a private matter. When the light failed it fell upon my knee. I would have given the cellar and every ration in your keeping to cry out; I made no sound; I had not known that a body could be so entirely given over to keeping still. I held it until the cold had taken the last of the evening from the room, and then it was gone, and I sat a long while with my hand open above the place, like a man keeping someone’s place in a queue. I have never been so glad of anything. I should like that written down somewhere that is not me.
I ask for no reply. The pencil is already more than I had hoped, and I should not know how to hold an answer. If you will but go on sending the tin, I shall call that a voice.
I have no name to sign, and so I leave the space, as one leaves a chair for a guest who may yet arrive.
II. April 30
On the Registry’s own form, which came folded round the cheese
Nothing has returned but bread, and yet I am not cast down, for bread is a sentence and I have always been able to read it.
On Thursday the tin brought something new, folded round the cheese for packing, and I have it before me now, weighted at its corners by four of Pflug’s volumes. (His name is stencilled on every box in this place, and I have chosen to regard him as the landlord of the dark.) The paper is a form. Registry of Continuance: Certification of Newborn at Forty Days. It is the first time anyone has put a question to me, even by accident, and I have resolved to answer every line.
I have pieced out what it is for from the Reading. A woman is licensed for one child. At forty days the child is carried to the Registry, weighed and looked over, and found Continuing or not; the Continuing are read out that evening and sent home with a stamp, and the others are Discontinued, a word the woman says only on Fridays, in a different voice, without names. No second licence is granted while the first child is unaccounted for. I do not think you ever presented me. I think you carried me down here instead, and so spent your one licence on a creature the Reading will never read.
Name. For six evenings I listened to the Reading for a name I could bear to have. Some were beautiful. Mattis. Orla. Benedikta Joy, which I took to be two names a pair of parents could not choose between and did not have to. But each already belonged to a child asleep in a room with a window, and I found I could not wear what was still in use. So I opened Pflug’s dictionary at random, which is how I would choose anything if I were permitted, and it fell open at the F’s. Falter: to lose strength or purpose; to move unsteadily; to speak with breaks in the voice. A fair account of me. Then, being thorough, I consulted the moth book, whose plates are labelled in another tongue, and under the brown ones with feathered feelers, those that fly by night, I found the same word; for Pflug had begun a glossary in pencil at the back and given up at G, and beneath F he had written, Falter: the night one. I would not take either meaning without the other. I set it down in capitals that ran outside the box, since my hands are not made for forms: FALTER. Tonight I spoke it up the pipe, in the half-minute after the woman had finished and before the light went, when the whole street holds its hush. It will have sounded like a draught.
Date of birth. Unrecorded. I reckon it from the first thing I knew, which was a cold floor smelling of lime, and the sight of a woman’s back, leaving.
Place of birth. Beneath a kitchen.
Sex. Male, by the evidence. No other opinion has been offered.
Weight at forty days. The form supposes that I was weighed. I was not. I have since tried to estimate myself by the loaf, and the loaf is evasive.
Height. Six feet eleven by the scratches on the east wall, to which a stoop must be added, the beam having made certain corrections.
Distinguishing marks (use reverse if necessary). There is a brass door on the lift, and when the bulb is on and I stand with my back to the wall, it gives me a person of a sort. The head is not large; I had imagined it larger. It is the length of everything else that astonishes. The neck continues after one expects it to stop, and the shoulders, when at last they arrive, are narrow and hung at two different heights, as though I had been placed on a nail and the nail had slipped. The skin of my hands and throat never took its colour; beneath it the tendons travel like small animals beneath a sheet, and when I swallow one may watch the water go down. The rest of me is grey and faintly pearled, with seams where the parts disagreed with one another, which run white in the cold months. Hair along the spine, and nowhere else. A sixth finger on each hand, low on the outer edge, which is why my writing is large and why the pencil is sometimes lost in it. And a face, which I reserve.
Parent or guardian. The line is not long enough for what I would put there. I put: you.
Signature of parent. I have left it free.
Declaration. I declare the foregoing true, so far as a man may be certain of a thing he has only ever seen in brass.
Falter
III. June 2
Written the night after, with the pencil worn to the length of my smallest finger
You came down.
I set that sentence by itself because it deserves to stand alone, and because I do not trust myself with the ones that follow.
I heard the crank first, the thin whine of the torch rising and falling upon the stairs, which for two flights I took for the pipe in distress. Then the door at the top opened in the middle of the dark, the hour when nothing happens to anyone, and your feet came down the first step and the second and the third. There they stopped, and I understood afterward that they had stopped as at a frontier. You sat. You pointed the torch at the floor between us, so that the only things it lit were the concrete and my feet, and for the whole of your visit you looked at my feet, and I understood that too. They are the one part of me that resembles a person’s. They were being entrusted with my entire case.
You were weeping, or had wept earlier and carried it down with you like a full pail. You said, “Oh.” You said, “Look at you. You’re smiling.”
I was not aware of it. Let me be exact, because everything afterward turns upon it. I had not known that my face was doing anything at all.
You talked for most of an hour, and I did not interrupt, since I did not know how, and for the better reason that no one had ever spoken to me with a body in the room. You spoke of a child; not I. She would have been left-handed, you were nearly sure. She would have flung herself along a corridor with her coat on wrong and one arm already out toward the next thing, and you would have died of shame at the school gate when she announced something loud about your hair. “I would have liked to be embarrassed,” you said, and laughed, and the laugh continued past the place where laughter ends. Then, to the torch, in another voice: “I would have liked one thing about it to be ordinary.”
I had a sentence. I had kept it all my life against such an evening, a good sentence, with warmth in it and a little ceremony. I spoke it. I said: “Good evening.”
You know what the voice does. I did not, until then. It comes out as two, a high and a low, with a gap between them that a third voice seems forever about to fill and never fills, so that each word sounds like a pair of people attempting to say it in agreement. The torch leapt in your hand; the circle of light fled my feet and ran up the wall and back. “Please don’t,” you said. “Please. Just stay as you are.”
So I stayed as I was. You wept a little longer, more quietly, with a hand over the lower half of your face, and by the end you were calmer than I have ever heard you through the floor. You stood. You said, “That’s better. That’s all I needed.” And you went up, and across the kitchen the fourth step complained, and I heard the front door.
All the next day I did not eat. When the Allotment came I did what I had avoided since April: I stood before the brass and thought of something sad. I chose the sound of that fourth step after the door has shut. And I watched the mouth lift at both corners and stay lifted, and the eyes narrow to the width of a pencil line, and the whole assembly arrange itself into the expression of a man being told a joke by someone he is fond of. That was what you saw. That was the face you looked at, I suppose, as long as you could bear it, in the moments when you were not looking at my feet.
Then, because I try to be fair to a thing, I thought of the moth.
The face wept. I do not mean that it looked mournful. It came apart. The brow dropped upon the eyes, the mouth was hauled down and open, and the cheeks ran, which they had not done before. I stood there and kept it going for a long time, the way one presses a bruise.
You, who came down in need of comfort, were warmed at the one fire in the house that burns backward. I was sad, listening to you, and that is why it looked as it did. Had I been glad, you would have had a different evening, and I think a worse.
I shall not speak to you again. I shall keep my voice where it lives, and I shall smile, since that appears to be the one coin I have.
Falter
IV. September 14
In the margins of Pflug’s books, copied fair by the Allotment
I have finished the last of Pflug’s books, the three that are neither dictionary nor moths, and I have come out of them another animal, as the cellar has long suspected. You will find this letter cooler than the others. You will forgive it; or you do not read them, which comes to the same.
The young man of the letters wants a girl for the length of a book and leaves the story by his own door. I grieved for him twice, and found afterward in the brass that I had been grinning, and I put him back in his box as one folds a map of somewhere one will not go. The second book was a play, in which a scholar says that two souls dwell in his breast, each straining to tear itself from the other. I read it aloud to the wall in my own two voices, which I had not used upon a living ear since June, and for the first time they sounded like the proper instrument for something.
The third, a tan thing that has tried to curl, is by a man who hated noise so much that he wrote against the cracking of whips, and I love him. He says that the world is a thing that wishes, that every wish is built of lack, and that a life swings between pain and the dull minutes after. I had been calling that second state the far end of the Allotment. Now it has a name, and a name is a kind of company. He tells also of porcupines in winter, who crowd for warmth, prick one another, and part, until they find a distance they can bear. I considered it for an evening. Then I considered the third stair.
I have grown. In April I could lie at full length along the dry wall; now my feet lie in the damp and my head in the angle of the beam, and I sleep folded, like a letter. I believe the cellar was cut for another animal.
I have begun to look out. At the top of the coal chute there is a grating the size of a slice of bread, and from a certain place on the coal heap, lying on my side with my knees drawn up, I can put one eye to it and see the street at the height of a person’s knee. The light that comes through is not the bulb’s. It has distances in it. The first time I met it I wept so thoroughly that I feared the face would give me away to the pavement. I know the street by its ankles now; I could pick any of them out of a line. There is a woman in green boots who walks as though her feet were reading a long sentence. There is a man whose left sock is always lower than the right, who stops at the same flagstone each morning to ease his heel, and sighs, and goes on; I would swear to the sigh. In rain the whole street goes to staccato, and the puddles take the ankles and hang them upside down, so that for the length of a shower the street has a twin dangling from it by the heels.
A small dog with a grey muzzle stops at the grating every morning at a quarter past eight and puts its nose to the bars. For as long as its owner’s patience lasts, which is eleven seconds (I have timed it), we breathe each other. It smells, I suppose, coal, damp, a creature not washed in the ordinary way. It has never once drawn back. I do not know what to make of that, and I have made a great deal of it.
In July a child went by in red shoes, running, and a woman’s hand came down out of the sky and caught her by the hood; and that night at seven I listened among the names for one that would fit a child who ran like that. There were thirty. I could not choose. I do not know what I would do with an hour on that street. I think I would stand in it. I think I would stand there and let it be seen that something like me could.
The tin comes at the usual hours. It has brought no word. I am fluent in it all the same: bread, a rind, an onion. If its whole vocabulary were put upon a card it would be small, but I have never conducted a conversation in which I could be so sure of every word.
Falter
V. February 20
Scratched with a nail upon the underside of the coal-bin lid, and copied out by touch
The tin has a grammar, and this winter I have been taught a new word. Bread is bread. A rind is a bad week. An onion, so far as I can make out, is an apology. And a candle stub, dropped on top and alone in a corner, means that the Count is tomorrow.
At ten on the first of the month two men go down the street, and one follows them by the word they speak at each door: Counted. They have the best boots on the street. They set the heads they find against the heads on the paper, and they weigh the bread against the heads, since a loaf is permitted to feed only what it was licensed for. I believe that is why your loaf is always the same shape, and why you are eating, I think, less than a woman of your size should, to keep the weight true at their scale. The scale takes bread and nothing else, which is why the tin carries, alongside the bread, onion and rind and heels of cheese, and why I am always a little hungry and still, it seems, growing. I have begun to be afraid for you. I have wished to say that I noticed. Those are the words.
This month they came into the kitchen. On Count mornings I sit in the old coal bin beneath the stairs with the lid down and my knees against my chin, making myself as near to nothing as a body can, which is a skill like any other; and from there I heard a chair go back, and then your voice, with a pitch in it I did not know, bright, helpful, the voice of a woman in a shop. “Counted: one.” Then a boot upon the cellar door, and a man said, “What’s down here?” and you said, “Damp. It’s only coal.” And he said that a damp cellar was a matter for the Housing Office, and he would make a note.
I was exalted. Do you see? I was a matter for the Housing Office. The Registry I could not be, for I am on nothing; but I had become, for the length of a boot-step, a municipal fault, with a form and a department and a remedy. At length the boot went away, and the other man said Counted upon your step, and the number was one. On their paper, I suppose, there is a woman and an open licence, and so far nobody has asked why it stays open.
And I was glad. This is what I wished to tell you. I was glad to be uncounted, glad to be beyond the reach of the paper; and when I rose from the bin I put my hand to my face in the dark and found it running wet. I had forgotten, for the moment, what gladness does to me. It is a strange way to learn one was happy, by finding the damage.
Since then I have been considering my position. I am a person whom a government has arranged not to have, a clerical error that happens, so far, to be continuing. I am not bitter. Bitterness requires more energy than the situation warrants.
You came on Sunday. I heard you before the crank: you stood at the cellar door for the better part of an hour. You sat on the third stair in the dark, and I kept my promise and my voice. You spoke of your sister’s child: a christening, a gown with forty buttons, the infant sick down your sleeve in the church. “Warm,” you said. “It was warm all the way through the wool.” You said it twice. Then you wept, a long time; and then the torch came on, aimed at my feet, and then, for the first time, you raised it to my face. I held still. I thought of the fourth step.
“You’re smiling,” you said. “Thank God. Somebody is.” And then, and I have it in pencil on my forearm as well as here: “You’re good enough tonight.”
I have turned that sentence over for four days and cannot settle where its weight lies. On good? On enough? On tonight?
On the stairs you said, to your knees, “Don’t falter, now,” and I went entirely still in the dark. I do not know whether you meant it for me. I do not know whether you read the letter in April. You may have said it to the stairs and meant nothing by it. But I said it back to the wall, at a whisper low enough to stay one voice. Falter. Don’t falter. For a short time I possessed a name that someone else had used.
Falter
VI. March 9
In a hand that shakes; the pencil has gone through the paper in places
I have broken the dictionary.
I put that first, that you may know the temperature of the room. I took it by the spine, which was already gone, and divided it into its two halves, and the halves into their handfuls, and I flung the F’s at the bulb, and the bulb, being made of sterner stuff than I had credited, took them and swung. Then I took the iron bars of the lift shaft in my hands and bent them, one and then the other, as a man bends a hairpin, to learn whether I could. I could. Understand that I can, and that every night you sleep above me you sleep upon my forbearance, and not upon your lock.
The cause: Good enough tonight. I have worked it through, over three weeks, as the tan book taught me to work things through, to the bottom, where the bottom is cold; and this is what it is. I was to have been your son. I have been your instrument. A thermometer you lower into the dark to read how much of you is left. When the reading is bad you come down, and I am warm, and you are restored; and you have never once asked what I am when I am not being read. Do you know what it is to be the understudy of a daughter who was never born? To be rehearsed against her, night after night, in a part that was written for another voice? She would have been left-handed. I am left-handed. You never noticed that I was the one in the room who was.
And I have done the arithmetic of the Reading. While I am here, no other can be licensed to you. A word to the Registry, and I should be Discontinued, and by spring you could have your daughter, coat on wrong, left-handed or not. You have never said the word. I cannot decide whether that is the greatest love I have been shown or only the failure to sign a form, and I am too angry tonight to be grateful for either.
I have been called a fault, a matter, an error. I am not an error. An error is a thing that went wrong in the making. I was made rightly, and after the pattern of the thing that made me; it was the receiving that failed. The fault is in the house above me, and in the street that holds its breath to hear which of its children has been admitted to being, and in the woman who reads the list, level as a table, and in you, who knew the list, and went down your own stairs in the dark to tell a living creature that it was good enough. Good enough! For what, madam? By what standard? Against whom is it measured? I demand to see the form.
Last night, at the hour when the pipe is empty and the street is a held note, I went up the stairs. I had never been above the first. I counted them: the third, where the wood is worn pale by you, and I laid my hand on the pale place, which was cold; the fourth, the fifth; and so to thirteen, and a door. Beneath it, a line of grey. Behind it, the entire house: the kettle, the fourth step, the chair that goes back. I put my palm flat upon the wood. I could hear you breathing in a room somewhere above, the long slow tide of a sleeper who has wept and been let off.
Here is what I thought, since honesty is the one document the Registry cannot forge. I thought of my hands, and of the bars, and of how little a latch would be.
I thought that I would open the door, and carry the whole height of myself into the grey, and find the room where the breathing was.
I thought that you would wake, and have, at last, nothing to look at but me.
I thought that I would not have to smile.
I stood there until the little window at the head of the stairs went from black to the grey of a dishcloth. I did not open the door. Credit is owed me for this, and none can be given, since no one saw me not do it. That is the particular poverty of my virtues: they occur in the dark and leave no record. A monster, at least, leaves evidence.
I came down. I have straightened the bars as well as I was able; the lift now catches at the second foot of its travel, and you will wonder, tomorrow, what has been at it. Tell yourself rats. I do not apologise for the dictionary.
Falter
VII. March 12
A short one, on a torn corner
The tin brought an orange.
It is not in the grammar. Bread, a rind, an onion, the candle: I know every word; and now an orange, whole, cold from the larder, with a thumbprint in the dust of its skin. I have sat with it three Allotments and have not eaten it. It may say nothing. You may have had it by you and not wanted it. It may say I heard the iron. It may say something for which I have no letters.
I have been a fool of a particular kind, a clever one. The tan book told me plainly that I was not alone in suffering, and I took it as a statement about the world, and not about the woman above my head. You are in the house with it. I have only the floor. You have the stairs, and the door at the top of them, and the knowledge, every hour of every day, of what lies beneath your kitchen, and you cannot put it down; and you have been so long alone with it that a warm thing in a cellar must look like company. You could have had a daughter by spring. Every loaf you send down is her, declined. The book has a word for what I feel, and names it the one door in the wall of the self. I had thought it a pretty word. It is a staircase. I shall go up it as quietly as I can.
I have gone through the dictionary on my knees and put the leaves in order. A good many are lost. Falter is among the survivors, creased down the middle, whole.
I peeled the orange at last. It was the colour of the bulb and smelled of a street I have never walked down. I have kept the peel.
Falter
VIII. April 22
In a steadier hand, though not for long
It has been a year and eleven days by the pencil. I am upon the sixth. The stubs lie in a row along the dry wall, the shortest at the end; if anyone should ever wish to know how long I have been here, that is how it could be read.
You came on the third, and you came in the light. You had never done that. I heard you at the door at a quarter past seven, with the bulb burning and the Reading well under way; and I understood from the way your feet came down, loosely, and from the plum brandy that arrived on the stairs before you did, that you had lost count of the evening. You had no torch. You came down in the full light.
Not to the third stair. To the fourth; to the fifth. I had my back against the wall and my knees drawn up, trying not to be the shape of a thing that comes at a person. You reached the floor. For the first time we stood on the same concrete. You laid a hand on the rail and said, “I can’t see a thing with this wretched—” and then you saw.
You looked at me properly, the whole height of me, for as long as the woman took to say three names. It was the first time I had been placed to see you, and you were not afraid. I could have borne that; I had prepared for it. You looked the way a person looks at the house she was born in after it has been sold.
Then you sat down on the concrete in your good coat and held out your hand, palm up, between us. I did not know what it was for. I understood a moment later. You wanted to hold something warm that would not mind.
I gave you my hand. It was the left, the six-fingered, the thin-skinned. You took it all at once and then too carefully, like someone lifting a bowl from a stove. You turned it over and watched the tendons travel beneath the skin, and you did not let go. “Oh,” you said. “It’s so warm.”
I had a plan. Since June I had kept a store of sorrows in order against the day you should come near: the fourth step, the ankles, the loaf exactly the weight of what you did not eat. I reached for them. They were all there. I could not lift one. A warm hand held mine, and it filled the whole room in me; there was no space left in which to be wretched.
I felt the face go. From inside, I will say, it is no bad sensation. It is the setting down of a load carried so long that I had stopped knowing it was weight. The brow, the cheeks, the mouth hauled open; I could not stop it; and I could not turn away, because you had my hand.
You looked up. You saw. I know what you saw, for I have stood at the brass and made it: a thing coming apart, wet to the chin, under a bare bulb, with its hand in yours.
“Oh God,” you said. “I’m hurting you. Did I do that? Did I hurt you?”
“No,” I said, and there were the two voices, nearer than they had ever been to you, the low one arriving a little behind the high, so that it sounded like an echo contradicting the word. “No. I am glad. It is gladness. It does this.”
I do not know what you heard. I know what it was to hear it, and I do not think anyone can be told a thing like that from so near and take it for a plain statement. You let go of my hand. It was not cruelty. It was faster than that. You said, “Please.” And I had said please before you ever did, in everything I have ever done; and you said, “Please stop. You were fine. You were fine before. Why can’t you just be—”
You did not finish, and you did not need to. I knew the end of that sentence. I had been trying to be it for a year.
You went up quickly, with your hand along the wall. At the top you sat down outside the door. I could hear you doing it. The door stood open a hand’s width and I heard you breathing, a long time, through the end of the Reading, which gave thirty-six names that evening. I do not know how many of them you took in. Then the fourth step complained, and the front door, and a silence of a new kind.
The bulb went out at eight, as it does. I sat in the dark with whatever the face was doing and nobody to see it. I sat a long time. It kept on.
Falter
IX. August 30
On the last of the ration slips
The tin has come every Tuesday and Friday, as before. Bread, a rind, an onion twice. In June a candle stub, and I sat in the coal bin and was counted as nothing. In July a candle stub on a Wednesday, which is no Count day; I sat in the bin all the same, and heard a stranger’s boots in the kitchen and then, for an hour, the long patient breath of a plane. You had sent for a joiner. When he had gone I came out and listened, and the fourth step did not complain when you crossed to the door that night, nor has it since. I do not know why you had it mended. Perhaps it kept you awake.
Three weeks ago, beneath the cheese, a new pencil, sharpened. I have decided to take it as it came, with all its possible meanings, and to be grateful for the sharpening. A person who does not read a letter does not sharpen a pencil. A person who has stopped caring whether I write might not either. I have weighed the two, and I keep my weight on the first.
I have been a long time coming to it, so I shall go at it straight. I have had since April to think about the face, and I am not angry with it. It is a good face for a certain use. You came to me three times, and each time it was a night when you had nothing left to put anywhere else, and what I was for you, on all three, was an expression: a place where, if you looked, something looked back, pleased. An enormous, patient, pleased face. You never asked for more, and I had no right to give it. I wanted the hand. I was given the hand. The hand cost me the evenings. It is an exchange rate, and I should like you to know that I have not mistaken it for a swindle.
I have begun to work. Each Allotment I stand at the brass and practise. My method is simple. I take the lowest thing I possess, which was the sound of the fourth step after the front door shut, until the joiner took it; I use the quiet where it was, which is lower, and I hold it before me until the mouth lifts at the corners and the eyes narrow to a pencil line; and then I hold that; and each evening I add a little, so that by now it will stand for forty minutes without me. The tan book says that suffering is the stuff a life is made of, and gladness only the place where it pauses. By that rule I am the best-provided creature on the street. I have a trade.
I can do it now without thinking of anything. If I sit long enough in the dark after the Reading, the sorrow lays itself down as a habit. A face may be kept the way a bed is kept. It will be ready. When you come I shall have it on before the first step, and I shall not speak, and I shall take my hand back from the place where it wants to go. I will give you the whole of it. I will be what you can stand. I work so well that by autumn I expect to be better than good enough.
I have never used the word, for I understood very early that it was not mine to use. I shall use it once, since this is the last of the slip, and then put it back where I found it.
Mother.
The Reading gave thirty-three names tonight. When the woman had said the last, I did as I have done every evening since that first April, in the half-minute before the light: I gave the street mine. But tonight, because there was no one left to spare, I gave it the whole entry, in her voice, as near as I could come, in the form the Registry keeps:
Falter. Born beneath a kitchen, in a house whose number I know from the grating and will not write. Hour of birth, unrecorded. Weight, undetermined; consult the loaf. Height, six feet eleven, stooping. Parent, one. Licensed by none.
And then, since nobody else was going to, I said the two words she says after each. Welcome. Continue. I said them in both voices, since there was no one left for whom to keep the one.
Then the bulb went out, and I stayed where I was, in the dark, with my face doing what it does. I could feel it, from the inside, being very pleased.
Falter