She’s eight North one West six Down, as far as she can tell, prying at cracks with the old dead ballpoint. Most of the rooms here are empty, but the floorboards almost never are: stones, tokens, coins, once a glass eye. Jackdaw gems.
Today it’s a plastic pill, one half orange and the other one clear. She opens it and out tumbles a scrap, the first piece of paper she’s seen here that wasn’t from the library. Inside, in big, quick boy’s handwriting, is written “Cosette.”
She sits, stunned and slumping. Beautifully, impossibly, horribly, she wakes to the idea of names.
He’s exhausted, dripping sweat. They both must be.
“Listen to me, Liza,” he says with a slow, desperate urgency. “I can’t do it. It’s Sysiphan, it’s impossible, there’s no way for me to carry enough.”
“Then,” she grates, “fucking do something about it.”
He groans. “How am I supposed to plug it with a straw, anyway? Who does that?”
“It’s all we’ve got,” she says. “We have to. We have to fill the basin.”
“But there’s a hole in the bucket,” he says, “my dear Liza.”
“Then fix it, dear Henry.” There’s no relief in her voice. “Dear Henry. Fix it.”
Thursday, January 1, 2004