AFTER THE THIRD THIRTY

stories twenty-one to thirty · Sale 41 to Retention

THE LOT AND THE LINE

A woman is broken into lots and every lot is correctly described. A flat is emptied, in the section after this one, and every object opens backward into a Sunday thirty-one years ago. A man sits an assessment and answers every item better than the target, and scores nothing, and leaves twenty-one words lighter than he came.

What the figures of this section show, laid together, is that accuracy is the instrument. Nobody in these ten stories is defrauded. The auction house states in its own catalogue that Lot 4 is still accruing and that it cannot warrant a final state. The retention schedule says plainly that hearing is part of retention and that items heard are billable whether or not retained. Everything is disclosed. Disclosure is the mechanism.

THE ONE WHO SAYS NO

In the middle of the section a woman at a survey declines to be put in any of three boxes and asks for one thing: leave the stops in. In the very next story a man in a queue watches an older woman reach a window and say no, and thinks about her every day afterward, and would like to ask her how it is done. Not whether. How.

The figures place those two side by side deliberately. They were made in the same week, to the same recorder, and she was standing behind him.

AND THE KINDEST ACT IN THE BOOK, SO FAR

A clerk breaks procedure to copy a verse into a file by hand, and the attachment has no field and no rate, and therefore no procedure exists by which it can be removed.