AFTER THE FIFTH THIRTY

stories forty-one to fifty · Nothing Worth Keeping to The Column

WHAT PEOPLE MAKE WORTHLESS ON PURPOSE

A man tells his wife a bedtime story with everything valuable stripped out of it: no names, no colors worth keeping, no numbers, no one at the gate. He tried keeping a green door once and woke with the fee already written in his head. Four units, payable on waking.

The figures of this section keep finding the same maneuver. A family burns forty years of a father’s recorded voice the night before the sale, and is billed for the withdrawal at a published rate, exact to the second decimal. A man is served last on a day when four tickets issued after his are called, having stood up five times to prove he is in the room.

Set together, they describe a competence: people in this city have learned to make themselves unbillable, and it costs them the thing they were protecting.

THE ZERO

On the job board, a posting for sitting with children in the arrivals hall records four thousand one hundred and two views and no applications. The rate is fair, the work is decent, the children are fine. It is the cruelest number in the book and it is presented without comment, in a table, between two other postings.

AND A COLUMN THAT KEEPS WHAT THE OFFICE DECIDED

The restated heights are the heights. The water is not consulted. A flood arrives, is recorded a ring lower, therefore requires no notice, and two doors take water — and the schedule has a column for doors.