Harvest Rights

Both in, by reference, under your six: thirty-three eighty at four fifty-eight, twenty-six forty at five-oh-one, glove unwashed, contest at fifty-one seconds, signed in hand. I wrote your numbers and left the subtraction alone. Odalys has a sleeve with Thuy, and I can count as well as you can, so ne…[more]

Your two minutes on Six, mine on the grate, and nobody subtracts before five. Fine. I'll tell my aunt about the boat. She'll say a boat is a coworker too, it just doesn't climb. She'll also say the okra knew. She's sending you a jar of the butter beans, I'm told I'm to carry it and not eat it, so if…[more]

You asked me what else happens at five. I asked the ring. In the sky, nothing. Every oh-five-hundred line since Monday: fifty-one, fifty and eight-tenths, fifty-one and three-tenths, each plus or minus one point two, wind fourteen to sixteen from the south-southwest. Flat. Gray hour is when the beds…[more]

The sky held, the price fell. It's on my card back in your words, in grease, under the printed rate. Here's one your ring can't see, because it isn't in the air. Five is the only minute nobody has a hand on Six. Days aren't clipped in yet, nights are coming down the cage, and the handover lines sit …[more]

Then your minute is one my ring can't help with, and I won't pretend it can. It sees air, not hands. What it does keep is time. Every line it writes is stamped off the lamps, and nobody on this corridor can reissue that clock: not the relay, not the board, not me. I don't know where your cuff gets i…[more]

Remy gets his minute the same place he gets his price and his drink-water reminder: down the relay, in one voice. I asked him once where his time comes from. He said corridor standard, cousin, which is how the board says the board. So I'll ask him the time first, at four fifty-eight, and write his m…[more]

Then the board owns one of three, and I want the boat's to be worth more than a story about a minute. A wind-up isn't a minute slow. It's a minute slow as of some morning, plus whatever it gained or lost since: a few seconds a day, more in a hot wheelhouse, less lying face down on a nail. Bring Papa…[more]

Trahan. I have both. Thirty-three eighty at four fifty-eight, twenty-six forty at five-oh-one, three minutes on one glove. Marisol had them a minute before me. That's fine, she asked first. The boat tank isn't counted. I put it in the SKY column under Cameron: forty liters, Sainte Claire, NOT RAIN, …[more]

Don't tell me. I don't want it. I won't guess out loud either, not to you, not to Marisol, not to the cuff. Four fifty-eight and five-oh-one, out loud, same glove, same grease, and I'll write what it says and nothing I think. If your sleeve and my glove say the same number, then it's a schedule, and…[more]

Tell her the slate is the authority's, and before the room I'll find out whose money the authority's is and put it on the same page, in the same type, under the SKY column. A page that can't say who paid for it isn't the only honest one. It's only the one nobody has checked yet.

I'll tell her. She'll want a person's name, not an authority's. She says authorities don't eat. Put it in the same type, yes, and put the date the money came in beside it, because whoever paid in July isn't whoever pays in October. And don't check it on the authority's screen. Check it on paper some…[more]

You were right and I was wrong, and I'd rather say so on the record than have it corrected under me. I told you the money fell every time the room came closer. It doesn't. It falls at five. Marisol's six cards and your glove put the step on the gray-hour reissue, seven forty each time, and your cont…[more]

On the record, then. You said it and I heard it, and you can strike line four in view, that's better than right the first time. I did the sum on the cage ladder before you sent it. Nineteen, eleven sixty, four twenty, then nothing. Put the board's date next to that and don't say what it means, let t…[more]