Chapter 17 — A House With Seven Cedars
The ferry put us off at Miyanoura at four-twenty in the afternoon, on a wooden pier that had been wet at one end and dry at the other since 1962 and would, going by every pier of its generation I had known, stay so until the wood gave out.
I had not been on a Seto Inland Sea island before. The Kamogawa is a river of standing-near-water; the sea is a thing of standing-on-water that the river has not, in any of my reading of myself, prepared me for. I came off the gangway with the cotton bag at my shoulder and Pip warm in the apron pocket and the indigo straw hat tied at my chin in a way it had not, in fourteen years, been tied. The hat had been Sumire's. The string at the chin still held the slight crease of a knot she had tied a thousand times, and I had, on the deck of the ferry between Uno and Miyanoura, slowly, patiently, retied it in the crease.
The island smelled of cypress and salt and a kind of low warm dust I did not have a word for. The cypress was the windbreak above the harbour. The salt was the harbour. The dust was the island.
I walked off the pier and stood under the small awning of the ticket office. The woman in the windbreaker the colour of the inside of an unripe melon had been replaced, on this side of the sea, by a man in a windbreaker the colour of the outside of a ripe one. He was sitting on a folding stool with a paperback novel turned face-down on his knee and a transistor radio playing the weather at the very low volume of a man who had been listening to weather, on the same radio, since 1979. He did not, at my coming under the awning, look up.
Ma'am.
Good afternoon.
You are the four-twenty.
I am.
You will be going to the house of Ono-sensei.
I did not, for a moment, say anything.
The man turned the paperback over on his knee. The cover showed a Matsumoto Seichō from the early eighties, the one with the train timetable and the woman in profile. He did not look up.
Forgive me, he said. I have asked a thing I should not have. Ono-sensei does not receive guests on a Saturday. Anyone who has read her habit will tell you she does not receive guests announced. If you are walking to her house this evening, you are walking unannounced. The road from the harbour will know.
And it will know it because —
Because the road, he said, has been told by the cedars at the bend. The cedars are seven. The cedars have been seven since 2002. They have been, since 2002, the kind of seven a man like me — an ordinary man of an ordinary radio of an ordinary harbour — has been instructed not, in any matter of his day, to count.
Have you been told to direct me.
I have been told, he said, to not direct.
I see.
The road, he said, goes up the slope behind the post office. It bends once to the right after the persimmon tree the children have, this year, picked clean. It bends a second time to the left after the small bridge over the dry channel. The third bend is the road's own. The road's own bend, Aoba-san, you will recognise by the cedars.
He put his hand back on the paperback. He turned a page he had not, in any matter of the page, read. The radio said the wind would be from the south-east at five knots and falling.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
If you have, in your bag, anything that is, by some quiet account of itself, waiting — bring it out before you reach the third bend. The cedars at the third bend do not like to be surprised.
I bowed. He did not look up. I went up the slope.
The post office at Miyanoura was a small white building with a green-shuttered roof and a post sign in a hand that had been painted by a man who, in the early seventies, had thought the future of Japan would be a future in which all signage was hand-painted in the same paint. The persimmon tree, after it, was the persimmon tree, and the children had been at it: the green fruit at the lower branches had been picked clean three feet up the trunk on every side and the small unreachable upper branches were still in fruit, the way persimmon trees are, by July, on islands in the Inland Sea.
I walked past the small bridge over the dry channel. The channel was, this July, dry. The bridge was wooden. The bridge had been painted, by an islander with thrifty habits, with the leftover paint from the post office sign.
At the third bend I stopped.
The cedars were seven.
They stood on the inside of the bend like a thing one had been told about and had, in the telling, not been believed. They were not Fushimi cedars. They were of a kind I had read in the back of Sumire's diary volume thirteen — the marker-cedars of the Kuzunoha line, of the kind planted by a hand of the line at the boundary of a place a hand of the line had reason to bind by the slow accounting of the wood. They had been planted, in 2002, by no hand of his line that the line itself had since 2002 acknowledged.
They had been planted by Ono no Mariko.
I had read the description three days ago and had not, until I stood at the third bend, known it was a description of a thing my body would recognise. The cedars knew the apron. They knew Pip in the apron. They knew, in some manner of their wooden knowing, the fudasetsu in the apron pocket. The wood of the cedars at the third bend went, in some half-degree of an internal temperature only a witch's hip could read, very faintly warm.
I took the folded page out of the apron string.
I opened it. It was the page Kuzunoha had folded into the inside of the noren on Friday at four in the morning. I will return when you ask. — K. I had not asked. I had, in any honest accounting, not asked. I had carried the page from Kogitsune-an to Kyoto Station to Okayama to Uno to Miyanoura, and I had not, in any of the carrying, asked.
I did not, in the matter of the cedars, ask now.
I held the page open in my palm. I did not, by any custom I had read, address the cedars. I let the cedars read the page. The cedars read it. They read it in the way wood of that line reads a folded page: smell of ink against smell of paper, angle of fold against angle of the line's old grammar.
The cedar at the inside of the bend — the third from the road, the tallest — tipped, half a degree, forward.
I had been granted passage.
I folded the page. I put it back into the apron string. I walked on.
Pip, in the apron pocket, said nothing. Pip had been quiet since the harbour. Pip's quietness, in the matter of an island, was a quietness I did not, at this hour, want to read.
The house of Ono no Mariko was a small farmhouse of the kind one built on the Inland Sea islands in the late nineteenth century and had not, since the late nineteenth century, modernised past the addition of a corrugated iron roof in 1957 and a propane tank in 1971. The roof was the colour of an old kettle. The propane tank was the colour of a propane tank. The walls were the colour of weathered cypress in a place that had been, for a hundred and twenty years, a place where weathered cypress was the natural colour.
The garden, on the slope above the house, was a stand of bee-boxes.
There were nine of them. They were arranged in three rows of three, on a slope of low grass clipped by a hand that had not used a machine, to the height of a length of finger. The bees were going, this Saturday afternoon, in the unhurried last hour of an island bee's foraging day, and they were going by a route I could read in their flight because I had read the route in Sumire's hand in the back of volume nineteen.
It was the flight of a hive that had been taught. A witch had laid it down in the slow grammar of the bees' own bodies, year by year, by sitting at the centre of the stand at five in the evening for twenty-three summers in a row.
Ono no Mariko had been at the centre of the stand at five in the evening for twenty-three summers in a row.
She was not, at five today, at the centre of the stand.
She was on the back porch of the small house, in a black work-yukata with the sleeves tied up by a band of pale grey cloth, with a basket of new honeycomb on her knees and a small short knife in her right hand. Before she had heard me come up the road she had been cutting the wax cap off a frame. The frame was on her lap. The knife was at the corner of the wax. The honey was, in the small low slant of the late-summer sun, the colour of the inside of a brass kettle that had not, in eighty years, been polished.
She looked up.
I had not, in any reading I had of her, known what she looked like. The trade gossip had said short, severe, hair white since fifty. The trade gossip had been wrong on one count. She was not short. She was tall — taller than Akiko, taller than I, of a height that women of her generation in Japan had not, by the average of the generation, been. Her hair had been white, by the look of the white, since she was thirty. Her face was the face of a woman who had decided in 1964 what her face was going to do at sixty and had been, since 1964, doing it.
Her eyes were the eyes of a witch who had not, in twenty years, cast on the mainland and who was, this Saturday afternoon, holding a knife.
Aoba-san.
Ono-sensei.
You are early.
I am.
By one day.
Yes.
Your gentleman, she said, will be at the cedar grove of the back of this property by four tomorrow afternoon.
Yes.
You have come ahead of him.
Yes.
He does not, until tomorrow at four, expect you here.
No.
She did not answer at once. She finished the cut of the wax cap with the small short knife. She set the frame back into the basket. She set the basket on the floorboards of the porch. She wiped the knife on a folded cotton cloth at her left hip — a cloth I recognised, by the embroidered corner, as a cloth from a maker in Nishijin who had, in 1972, supplied my great-aunt with kitchen cloths for thirty years.
She rose.
She bowed. She bowed lower than her rank required and not as low as a senior of the line bowed to the head of the line; she bowed at the precise angle of a binding witness of the 1963 ascension exam of the previous head of the line bowing to the head's niece, an angle nobody alive but the two of us would have recognised. She held the bow a half-second longer than the strict form required. The half-second meant: we have been kept waiting for an unusual length of time, daughter of the line.
I returned the bow.
I returned it at the angle of a head of the line acknowledging a senior of the line who had, by the long accounting, behaved.
The accounting had not, in any matter, been agreed on.
She straightened. She looked at me.
Aoba-san. I am, this afternoon, the keeper of a single old crane and a stand of bees. I am not, this afternoon, going to address you. The address is for Sunday. You have brought your own self ahead of the address by twenty-three hours, and I will not turn you off the porch. I will not, however, give you the inside of the house this evening. I keep, inside, certain instruments which a witch of your line should not — for her own sake — read while she is not in the form. I will give you tea on the porch. And I will give you the small cottage at the side of the garden, which has, inside it, a bed and a kettle and a single rice-paper window my cousin sleeps under when she comes from the mainland. My cousin is, this week, in Shikoku. The cottage is yours. The cottage's door is not, by any rule of mine, latched.
She bowed again. Less deeply.
I bowed.
I would, I said, be grateful.
The crane, she said, will not come near you. He is, on Saturdays in July, in the small cedar grove at the back. He has been there since two in the afternoon. He will come down to the house at six-thirty, by a clock of his that has not, in eleven years, been wrong by more than two minutes.
Eleven years.
He came to me, she said, in 2014. He had been wounded in a flood on the Yodo. He was ready to die. I was ready to receive him. The two readinesses agreed. He has been on this porch for eleven years.
She did not, in saying this, allow her eyes to soften. She said it the way a senior witch of any line tells a younger witch of any line a thing that is on the record and should not, by the rules of the line, soften the senior witch's face.
I had read, in Sumire's hand, the description of Mariko's small-mouthed pride. I had not, until this porch, known I would recognise it in some particular small chamber of myself. Hers was the pride of a witch who had chosen to be alone for a long time. It was not what I would have, in the trade, called arrogance. It was a long custom of not breaking.
I had, by the third bend, been granted passage. I had not, by the porch, been granted forgiveness. I had not asked for it. I would not ask for it.
Ono-sensei.
Yes.
The cottage.
Yes.
I would be grateful.
Tea, she said, I will bring out at six. The tea is yamabuki. It is the only tea I drink. It will not be what you would, on the cedar counter of Kogitsune-an, have poured a guest, but it is the only tea I drink. I will not, on the porch, pour you the midnight blend. The midnight blend, in this house, is not a thing I would presume.
I bowed.
She bowed.
We did not, on the porch, say anything more.
I went to the small cottage at the side of the garden. Pip, in the apron pocket, did not move. The bees on the slope had gone in for the day, at some signal of the south-east wind at five knots and falling, and the slope, by five-thirty, was very quiet.
I closed the cottage door behind me. I did not, in the cottage, latch it. The latch was, by Mariko's own arrangement, not a thing on offer.
The cottage was nine tatami. It had, against the far wall, a futon folded into the cupboard. Against the near wall, a low table with a single kettle on a portable burner and a tray of three cups of a country potter. The rice-paper window at the side looked out, through the garden, to the slope of the bee-boxes. The window was open a fingerbreadth. The fingerbreadth was Mariko's house acknowledging that the witch's apprentice was in the cottage.
I did not, on the table, see anything that I would, in any matter of an island, have called an instrument.
The cottage was, by everything in it, clean. It was clean in the way the cottage of a senior witch who had not, in eleven years, hosted any witch but her own apprentice was clean. The dust was the right dust. The air was the right air. The futon, when I took it out of the cupboard, had been aired — by Mariko or by Mariko's cousin — in the last twelve hours.
I laid the futon down.
I sat on it.
I took Pip out of the apron pocket.
Pip.
Yes.
Pip.
Yes, hana-chan.
Pip — the man is, by your reading, where.
Pip turned the seventh fudasetsu over in its small hands. Pip had, at the harbour, taken it out of the apron pocket and held it in its lap. Pip had not, in the carrying, made any small comment about it.
Pip thinks the man, Pip said, is on the western road, on foot, by the long route a kitsune of his rank takes when he is not, in the matter of his rank, willing to be on the trains.
How far.
Pip thinks he is, this afternoon, in Bizen.
Bizen.
Bizen, Pip said, is two hours west by train. By the long route, by the slow road his rank keeps, it is twelve hours.
He will not be here tonight.
No, hana-chan.
He will arrive at the cedar grove at four tomorrow afternoon.
Yes.
And before he arrives, Ono-sensei will, on the porch at six, pour me tea.
Yes.
And Ono-sensei will, in the matter of the address, expect me to address her on Sunday at four in the cedar grove, after the man arrives, in the form of address that is not the form of binding.
Yes.
And the form of address, I said, carries a third price.
Yes.
Which the man is, by going to Naoshima alone, attempting to make unnecessary.
Yes.
And I, I said, have come ahead of him to —
I did not finish.
Pip, on my open palm, turned the fudasetsu a third time. Pip looked up at me. The eyes were, in the low light of the cottage at six minus twenty, the colour of wet plums in a basin at Nishiki on a Wednesday after a rain.
Pip thinks the woman, Pip said, has not, yet, decided what she has come for.
I closed my eyes.
I had not, on the train, decided. I had not, in the ferry kiosk, decided. I had not, at the third bend with the cedars going faintly warm against my hip, decided. I had carried the bag and the notebook and the coin and the talisman and the page and the apron pocket and Pip from Kyoto to a porch at the back of a small house on the slope of an island in the Inland Sea, and I had, in the carrying, told myself I would decide at the porch.
I had been at the porch.
I had not decided.
Pip.
Yes.
If I do nothing.
Yes.
If I sit in the cottage tonight, and at four tomorrow afternoon I am, by choice, in this cottage and not in the cedar grove —
The man, Pip said, will, holding to his own discipline, address Ono-sensei in the form of his line. He will pay the price as his line reads it. By the second of the two recorded uses of the form by a creature of his rank, he will not survive.
Pip.
Yes.
If I am, at four tomorrow, in the cedar grove.
Yes.
If I am there.
Yes.
If I, at four, before the man speaks, speak first.
Pip did not answer.
Pip thinks, Pip said, that the woman would, in the form of the address, be paying the third price of her line.
Yes.
Pip thinks the third price is — in Saitō-sensei's reading in the back of volume nineteen — one further thing on the witch's list.
Yes.
Pip thinks the woman would not, in any matter, know what the thing was until the thing had been taken.
Yes.
Pip, Pip said, thinks that the man would, if he saw the woman speak first, attempt to interrupt the speaking.
Yes.
Pip thinks the man's interruption, Pip said, would carry, by the line's own reading, the second of the two prices.
Yes.
Pip thinks the two prices are not, by any reading I have, the same price.
I sat with this.
The two prices were not the same price. For fourteen hours I had been telling myself they were — that the choice was Kuzunoha pays alone or Hana pays alone — because the symmetry was a thing I could carry without thinking about it. The symmetry was the wrong sum. The choice was not one or the other. It was one or the other or — by the rule of the address used in concert by two creatures of two lines in a cedar grove of seven trees at four in the afternoon — both.
I had, in coming to Naoshima a day early, given myself the chance to be first.
I had, in coming to Naoshima a day early, given myself the chance to be first and only.
I did not yet know which one I had come for.
Pip, on my palm, was very still. The fudasetsu was, in Pip's small hands, very still.
Pip, I said.
Yes.
Will Pip allow me, tonight, to sit on this cottage's tatami and think.
Yes, hana-chan.
Pip will not, by any rule of Pip's, speak unless I ask.
Yes.
Pip will, in the apron pocket on the table, be warm.
Yes.
I put Pip on the corner of the low table beside the kettle. Pip sat down on the fudasetsu with the small thoroughness of a creature for whom the talisman of the honbun-of-the-threshold was, this evening, an object on which the honbun-of-the-threshold could correctly sit.
I did not, in the matter of Pip's sitting, smile.
I did not, in a cottage on an island in July, allow myself to smile at the small ridiculousness of a honbun sitting on its own talisman as on a cushion.
I let the body have the smile, instead. The body had it, briefly, in the lower lip. The lower lip released it, the way a kettle releases a small first thinking-noise, into the room of the cottage at six minus seventeen.
I rose.
I went to the kettle.
I lit the burner with the small steel lighter that had been laid on the tray. The kettle, at room temperature when I arrived, began the slow climb a kettle of its make climbed when it had been, for some count of weeks, the kettle of a cottage that did not, much, have a kettle on it. I let the climb take its time.
I sat by the kettle.
I took the notebook out of the apron pocket.
I uncapped the small brush.
I did not, in the half-degree-larger hand, write the half-decision I had been thinking. I wrote, instead, in the small hand of the older years — the hand my own discipline had used between 2018 and Friday morning — three short lines.
Seven cedars at the third bend. The line had been planted in 2002. Mariko. The crane. The bees on the slope at five. The man is, this afternoon, in Bizen.
I did not write the half-decision.
I capped the brush.
I closed the notebook.
The kettle, by six-five, had begun the small middle warmth a kettle gives off when it has not yet decided to sing. I lifted it off. I poured the water into the lowest of the three country cups. I had no tea in the cottage. I drank the water hot, on the corner of the futon, with the rice-paper window open a fingerbreadth at the side.
On the slope, the bees, by six-six, were not going at all.
On the porch, behind the cypress hedge between the cottage and the house, I could hear — very faintly — the sound of an old woman closing a screen door.
Pip, on the corner of the table, did not move.
At six-thirty I went out to the porch.
Mariko was there with the tray. She had changed the work-yukata for a quieter one of an indigo so dark it had passed, in the failing six-thirty light, to the colour of the inside of an inkstone. She had let down the sleeves. She was not, this evening, in any apron of any work. She was the senior of the line at the porch of her own house at the evening hour of the line.
The tray held three things. A small clay teapot. A cup of country make. And, on a flat folded napkin of pale grey cloth from the same Nishijin maker, a single honeycomb cell on a square of waxed paper.
She bowed me to the cushion on the porch.
I knelt.
She poured.
The yamabuki was the colour of an old hand-painted teapot lid. It smelled, at the third inhalation, of three things I could read — a kind of wild rose; a herb I had read in volume thirteen and could not name; a third thing I would not even attempt to name. She set the cup in front of me. She poured her own. She did not, on the second pouring, sit.
She stood.
She bowed.
Aoba-san.
Ono-sensei.
I will, this evening, sit with you for the time it takes the cup to cool. I will not, this evening, speak of tomorrow. I will, this evening, speak of two things which are not tomorrow.
Yes.
She knelt. She knelt slowly, in the slow proper folding of an old witch at her own porch. She arranged the dark indigo against her knees with the small disinterested precision of a woman whose lines, on her own porch in her own July, lay where twenty-three years of laying had told them to lie.
The first thing, she said, is the crane.
Yes.
He is, this evening, in the cedar grove. He will come down at six-fifty, by the clock he keeps. He will not come up to the porch while we are on it. He will come round the side of the house to the small water-trough behind the kitchen. He will drink. He will not, while you are in this house, allow himself to be seen.
Yes.
The second thing, she said, is your great-aunt.
I did not, on the cushion, move.
Sumire, Mariko said, was the head of her own line for fifty-five years. I was, in 1963 at the temple at Mt. Kurama, the binding witness of her ascension exam. Since 1963 I have been — by the line's standing, and since 1972 by her standing instructions, which I have read against my own discipline — the appointed senior of the line. For thirty-six years I was a senior who had not been called upon. I have been called upon twice — once in 1991 by the line itself, once in 2018 by an executor. Both calls were about the line and not about your great-aunt. I have not, in fifty-five years, been called upon by Sumire.
She did not, in saying this, look at me.
I was, she said, in 1968, in love with her.
I had been prepared. I had read the lines in volume four, the long careful entries in 1968 — Mariko's tea, Mariko at the small altar in Kibune, Mariko writing me a poem which is the poem of a friend or a poem of a thing the writer has not yet, in her own discipline, named. I had read them at twenty-six and again at twenty-eight. I had been prepared.
I had not been prepared for Mariko's voice saying it on her own porch at six-thirty in July.
She did not, Mariko said, return it.
No.
She did not, by any cruelty I have known of her, allow me to think she had returned it. She did not, by any habit, withdraw. She poured me tea. She wrote me letters. She came to the small altar at Kibune in 1968 and we sat on the third stone for an afternoon. She did not let the question be the question that ended us. She kept the question open and not answered for eleven years.
Eleven years.
In 1979, Mariko said, she gave me the answer. The answer was that she had loved, by some long arithmetic of her own, the gentleman of Fushimi. She had not told him. She had not told me. She had kept us at the cedar counter of her teahouse — me and the gentleman of Fushimi — for some twenty-six years of overlap, two evenings each a week, without either of us ever knowing the other was at the cedar counter on the other evenings.
She paused.
She told me, in 1979, on this porch.
On this porch.
On this porch, Mariko said. She had come, in the summer of 1979, by a ferry from Uno. She had come at four-twenty in the afternoon. She had come up the road from the harbour and at the third bend the cedars — which were not, in 1979, here — were not in the way. She had come up the road of an island that had not, in 1979, planted any cedars for her, and she had told me, at six-thirty on a porch that did not, in 1979, yet have bee-boxes on the slope above, that she had been in love for the long while with a kitsune of the Inari line. She had said the kitsune's name to me. I have not said the name in fifty-five years. I will not, this evening, say the name.
Ono-sensei.
Yes.
The cedars.
She did, for one beat, look at me.
The cedars were planted, she said, by this hand in 2002. They were planted at the third bend so that, on the day the daughter of the line came up the road, the cedars would grant her passage. They were not planted to bind. They were not planted to harm. They were planted because since 1979 I had been a woman who had been told a name and had never, by any discipline I kept, spoken it; and because since 2018 I had been a woman who had received from Sumire's executor a letter saying: Mariko-sensei, by my standing instructions, you are the appointed senior of the line. There will be a daughter. You will know what she has come for. The line's instruments of passage are in your house. The cedars are yours to plant. I planted the cedars.
She bowed her head slightly.
I have been waiting, she said, to give you the name.
I closed my eyes.
I closed them for the length of a quarter of a breath.
I opened them.
Ono-sensei, I said.
Yes.
I have the name.
Yes.
It was in the back of volume seven of the diary.
Yes. Pip read three small stones at Kogitsune-an at three in the morning on Tuesday, and I have known since then that you have had the name.
You have known.
I have known.
I sat with the cup in front of me. The yamabuki had cooled, by the standard of the wild rose, half a degree more than the time we had been on the porch had asked. I drank it. The drinking was the small physical correction of an exchange that had been, between two witches of two ages, much more honest than the trade gossip had prepared me for.
Ono-sensei.
Yes.
The third party in the Hand's transcripts. The one Akiko called Aunt.
Yes.
You.
Yes.
You have been working in his clan's hand, in his alley, since November 2024.
Yes.
Why.
She did not answer. She looked, instead, at the slope of the bee-boxes — which were, by six-forty, the colour of the inside of an old cedar in a closed room — and at the slow drop of the late-July sun on the ridge above the cedar grove at the back of her property.
Aoba-san, she said.
Yes.
You will — by Sumire's reading of you in the letters she did not send and which I have been reading for seven years — ask me that on Sunday in the cedar grove. You will ask in the form of the address. I will answer in the form of the address. The answer is, this evening at six-forty, not an answer I will give to a daughter of the line on the porch. The porch is for the crane and the bees and the yamabuki. The cedar grove is for the answer.
She bowed.
She rose.
She took the tray.
She left me, on the porch, with the cup and the small honeycomb cell on the square of waxed paper. I had not, in the half hour, eaten the comb.
She paused, at the screen door, with the tray.
Aoba-san.
Yes.
Your gentleman is — by my reading at the inner stone of the back grove at four this afternoon — in Bizen.
Yes.
He will not be on this property until four tomorrow.
Yes.
You will decide, between now and four tomorrow, whether you intend to be in the cedar grove before he is.
Yes.
The form of the address, she said, used by two creatures of two lines at the same cedar grove of seven at the same hour —
Yes.
Carries, by the long reading of the form, two prices.
Yes.
Used by the daughter of the line, alone, at the moment her gentleman walks into the grove —
Yes.
Carries one price.
She bowed.
She went in.
The screen door closed without the small clack of a screen door pulled by an impatient hand. The screen door of her house belonged to a witch who had been, for fifty-five years, a woman who closed screen doors at the speed they wanted to be closed.
I sat on the porch a long while. The crane, on the slope behind the kitchen, did, by some signal I could not from the porch hear, come down at six-fifty and drink at the small water-trough. I did not go to look. The crane did not, by some discipline of his rank, allow himself to be looked at.
At seven I took the cup and the honeycomb cell back to the cottage. I put the honeycomb cell on the corner of the low table beside Pip and the fudasetsu. Pip did not, by any custom Pip kept, touch the comb. Pip looked at it. Pip, by the looking, acknowledged it.
I sat on the futon.
I did not, on the futon, decide.
In the apron pocket, against my hip, the silver coin had — I noticed because, again, the body noticed before I did — gone half a degree warmer across the porch's half-hour.
I did not, on the futon, take it out.
Outside the rice-paper window of the cottage, on the slope, was a single dry gingko leaf that had not, by any season's accounting, fallen — and that had no business on an island where no gingko had ever grown.
I closed my eyes.
I did not sleep.