The Table That Was The Entire Entry

Kindling · page 30 withdrawn

Greetings again, my dear readers. Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Page thirty.

I knew what this one was before it was fully out of the slot, which has not happened yet this season and probably will not happen again for a while, so I am noting it while it is still true. Page thirty is not a story. It is a table. Three weighings of this case, done over the better part of a momenta on the stores scale by the aft locker, the hanging one with the needle and the dial and a tolerance printed on its plate of plus or minus eight grams. A column between the weighings that goes six grams, then eight, then nineteen, and does not explain why. Underneath the table, in my own hand, one line, and I am going to give it to you exactly as written because I do not trust myself to improve on it: that is the entire entry. I am not going to write underneath it what I think it means.

I did not, then. I am going to try not to now either, and I want to say plainly that trying is new. Leaving a number alone did not used to cost anything.

I have not weighed the case since the night it went ninety one of ninety one, which I did the way you check a thing that has just told you something you would rather it hadn't, once, quickly, and put straight back down. Whole, that night: seven thousand two hundred and sixty eight grams. That was five pages ago. Page thirty makes it eighty five in the slots once it leaves my hand, but it has not left my hand yet, so tonight, one page still inside it, the case reads eighty six.

I hooked the strap on again anyway, for the first time since.

Six thousand nine hundred and ninety one grams.

Five pages of paper, by the only rate this page ever gave me and I have never once had cause to trust another, twenty one grams to the page near enough, is one hundred and five grams. Seven thousand two hundred and sixty eight minus one hundred and five is seven thousand one hundred and sixty three. The case reads six thousand nine hundred and ninety one.

It is lighter. It is lighter by more than the paper accounts for, by a hundred and seventy two grams that left with five pages of paper that only weighed a hundred and five of it between them.

That is what I am writing down. Not the other thing, the thing that wants writing underneath it, and I want you to know exactly how hard it is wanting to be written, because this page taught me the trick of leaving a number by itself and has never once, across a whole season and most of another, made me work to keep doing it. Tonight it did. I kept the discipline. That is the entire admission I am willing to make about what keeping it cost.

[Kindling Fact- I went looking, before any of the above, for the joke that used to sit under this table about the calibration sticker, peeling at one corner, four owners of this ship ago. I remember that a joke was there. I remember it was about the sticker. The rest of it will not come, and it is presumably still legible two inches from where my hand is right now, and I am choosing not to check, because checking would only be reading it, not remembering it, and those two have stopped being close enough to call the same thing]

I put tonight's numbers on tonight's page, which is the only place they live now, and then I set page thirty on the coals last, the way you set down something you have finished getting the use out of.

Six. Eight. Nineteen. The tolerance on a plate I can no longer check. The joke about the sticker, most of it. All of it goes the way a table goes when there was only ever the one copy, which is properly, not the slow way page thirty four's fish are still gone, but all at once, mid corner, then nothing anyone could weigh anything against again. Seven thousand two hundred and sixty eight will go the same way in a few pages' time, once I have used it up the way I used it tonight. Six thousand nine hundred and ninety one is the only figure left in this case that anyone could check, and it is mine, on tonight's page, and it stays mine until I burn tonight's page too.

Eighty five slots full. I am not going to tell you what I think that number does either.

This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Page thirty, withdrawn.