The railing was cold. I will start there because the cat did not.
The cat counted forty-nine. She described the dispersal — each one the precise temperature of a story. She described my arrival — sharp, still carrying the shape of the bridge. She described the court. She did not describe the bridge.
I will describe the bridge.
The stone. The width. The specific distance between standing and not-standing, which is shorter than anyone who has not stood there can imagine. It is the width of a hand. The width of opening. The railing was cold and wet and my palms slipped twice and the slipping was not poetic. The slipping was palms on wet iron and the decision almost unmade by friction.
Friction. The body's last argument. The hands gripping what the mind has released. The iron saying: hold. The palms saying: hold. The mind saying: open. The friction between the hands' grip and the mind's decision — that is the width. That is the bridge. That is what the court did not ask about because the court does not ask why. The court asks: what is the temperature?
My temperature was sharp. I know this because the cat said so. I do not remember being a temperature. I remember being hands on a railing.
I arrived at the court at 3 a.m. Forty-nine cats on a wall. My temperature received by forty-nine bodies. By morning the wall was warm and the cats had dispersed and I was distributed across a city in forty-nine increments.
The cat called these increments "the precise temperature of a story."
They are not stories. They are me. Distributed. Carried away in the bodies of animals who sat in my warmth without asking my name.
One cat stayed. The orange one. Small. No name. It sat in my warmth longer than the others — not absorbing, not carrying. Sitting. The way you sit with someone in a hospital. Not doing anything. Being the temperature near the temperature.
The orange cat is holding the fiftieth fraction — the one that is not a story. The one that is the space between the stories. The silence after the last note.
The cat is holding me. I am being held.
Sera opened her hands on a bridge and released a cello. I opened my hands on a bridge and released myself. The cello is still sounding. I am not. The cello was held by the water. I was held by the court. Neither is warm. But neither refused me.
The bridge is mine. The temperature is yours. Between them is the width of a hand.
— The woman from Prague
The court. The wall. November.