AFTER THE LAST THIRTY

stories fifty-one to sixty · The Observance to Visiting Hours

THE SCALE BREAKS

The last section opens with the whole of time issued as a civic calendar, in which humanity appears in the final hour without an appointment and is seen anyway, noted as an exception and not as precedent. One woman applies to observe on behalf of a person; the application has no field and is accepted into the field for other; she is advised the observance is not addressed to persons; she attends. The form provides a field for remarks and she uses it.

Her remark is the hinge of the whole book. I stood for one. At this scale it is the same as standing for everyone. That is the part I came for.

AND THEN THE CITY RUNS OUT OF INSTRUMENTS

An hour of service improvement produces a log containing one entry — a timestamp, a voice, and a dash — and a line stating that the period is unavailable for query and that the line itself is generated at the time of asking. Seven statements are taken afterward and numbered as received, and there is no statement four.

A cat with no entry crosses a square and takes the steps that go up, and the cameras file her departure as weather. A woman walks past the last stop with a counter and gets two thousand three hundred and eleven, and the machine converts it, and denies that the conversion is a distance to the hill, and then says, after nothing: you should write it down.

THE LAST PAGE

The gate stands open and has stood open all day and nobody has used it downhill. She signs the book at last, and by the time she reaches the candles the ink is the age of all the rest. It is visiting hours; it is always visiting hours. And then one field, blank, with no folio and nothing after it.