The bus voice lost the end of the stop announcement, the way it loses the end of everything longer than a breath, and she gave it back under her breath, certain and wrong: for good.
She has three endings and they fit everything. Thursday. For good. And then we’ll see. She has never once been told she was wrong, which is not the same as being right, and she knows the difference and supplies anyway. She was nine when the block came to their landing, the cheap one, the one that takes the last word off anything long, and she has been supplying ever since.
The form at the counter trailed its final clause into a comma and a box. She inked the box and finished the clause in her head, kindly: and then we’ll see. The girl at the counter stamped it without reading. The box has taken the same three endings from her for six years and the form has never once been returned.
The famous instruction, the empty tenth, the one everybody leaves be — she has an ending for it. She has had it for years. She says it to herself in queues, at the level of a pulse, and it fits, and nobody will ever check.
Once she supplied aloud, and not to a person. A neighbor on the landing held out a handset with a message from the ward on it, the day, and then the clean edge, and said nothing, and did not need to. She spoke the ending into the block. The block set it down in text beneath the rest, in the same size as the ward’s own words, and the neighbor read it off the screen: Thursday. The neighbor went on the Thursday. Nobody has said anything to her about it since, and the flowers on that door were down by the weekend.
At the pictures she has seen both endings of the one at the counter, the leaving and the staying, and she can supply a third that beats them both, and has, quietly, in row nine, twice.
Overheard on the stairs: a man saying if she thinks I’m going to stand here and — and the door took the rest. Thursday, she gave him, going up.
Her mother’s messages arrive the old way, long, and docked. The block at her mother’s end takes the last word off everything, has done for eleven years, so that all her mother’s sentences arrive leaning forward. The new one came at six: the doctor looked at the pictures and says it’s — and then the message’s clean edge, like a cut page. Beneath it the block prints what it removed, which is a number, and the number is one.
The earliest of the seventeen is in pencil, in a hand that had not learned to keep a line: and then they went home and the dog was already there.
She owns one paper book. The last page has been gone since before she could read; folded inside the cover are seventeen last pages in her own hand, different ages, different inks, none of them right, none of them thrown away.
She played the message four times. On the fourth she heard, behind her mother’s voice, the block’s own small pause where the sentence had been cut, the sound of nothing being taken, which she has been listening past all her life. She knows the word. It is her whole trade to know the word; in either direction, mercy or not, and it would fit, and nobody would ever check.
She pressed record and said nothing for a second, which the block would keep. Then she said the one word, only the word, and stopped. Four seconds. At her mother’s end the block takes the last word off everything.
She sent it anyway. Then she recorded it again, the same word with a second word after it, any word, a word for the block to take, and held her thumb over send, and did not, and kept it.
She has an ending for that too.