AFTER THE FIRST THIRTY

stories one to ten · Many Happy Returns to Crowd, Moved

THE ARITHMETIC ARRIVES BEFORE THE GRIEF

Thirty figures in and the book has not yet asked you to feel anything. It has asked you to add up. A birthday party where the chairs move one way and never come back; ten renewals against one life; a doorbell rung six times with the answer changing at the third ring; a free hour with a record underneath it; two hundred and six words against a fare of two hundred and forty.

What the figures show that the prose withholds is that the sums are always visible and never stated. Cheap Words never tells you the shortfall. It gives you a number a mother has, a number a fare requires, and a number the board will require next year, in one sentence, and lets the reader do the subtraction that the mother is doing in the kitchen. Drawn as three bars, the story’s whole cruelty is one glance.

THE COUNTS THAT DO NOT AGREE

A pattern establishes itself early and holds for the rest of the book: wherever two parties count the same thing, they disagree, and the party with the record wins. The crane driver’s hands say twenty-three and the drawings say nineteen. A diary mentions four removals and shows two. A register reads a name for a term after the renewals stop.

The figures make the shape of that disagreement legible in a way no sentence does. The disagreement is never in one sentence. It is in the gap between a number on page one and a number on page four.

AND ONE THING THAT IS NOT COUNTED

Twelve seconds of lit glass, where the two cars of the funicular pass. It is the only unrecorded meeting in the first ten stories, and the only one anybody answers.