Her wrist wakes the dead. She holds it low against her hip, trying for one plate at a time.
Nine hundred and forty stones on the seaward slope. Three hundred and eleven left. Play the plate. Read the granite. File the difference. Walking the ground, the office calls it.
Row 40, stone 12. Devoted father. Fifty-one years in the fish trade. A GOOD MAN ON THE WATER. Corresponding. The cutters had to face the families afterward.
Row 40, stone 19. Beloved wife of. HERE LIES HER OWN WOMAN. Four categories. One lit already. She selects sentiment, family-supplied.
In the close rows two plates talk over each other. The latest renewal is loudest.
Row 41, stone 8. Silence. Salt, battery, lapse. WE WILL COME ON THURSDAYS. Ground worn by standing feet. Corresponding.
Row 42, stone 1. Name. Trade. Four decades. HE PAID FOR THE CROSSING OF NINE.
Her hands do the sum inside her sleeves. More words than one man could hold. She marks corresponding twice. The tablet accepts once.
At noon the other corrector brings his flask. He is nineteen, calls them units, has been told twice about the plates and once about the flask.
"Does anyone check?"
She unscrews the lid and asks his name. Idris. He asks hers. She tells him while she pours.
Tall verse stones below. Then the bad decade's slabs, four names each. Then short granite, plates doing the speech. At the top, this year's deep, long letters. Over-inscription, the office calls it. She has filed none.
One hundred and six discrepancies in six hundred and twenty-nine. Office average: two hundred and eighty. Her supervisor said thorough twice.
Row 42, stone 6. Taken from us. TAKEN. Nothing filed.
Row 43, stone 11. The plate starts its sentence three times. DO NOT BELIEVE THE ONE UNDERNEATH. The cut takes her whole thumbnail. Corresponding. In the notes: the stone anticipates the plate by eleven years.
By three she reaches the row she has avoided all week. Her heels dig in. She marks deferred, access, the category for a locked gate.
Her mother is nine along. Six years of a debit on the ninth. In the fortnight after, a kind man offered her approved phrases on a screen. She chose She made every room easier. True. The truest sentence she has ever bought.
In the first week a neighbor had asked to pray. She had said she would not join in. The neighbor stayed anyway, made soup afterward and ate with her. She had finished her bowl.
No money for cutting that year. Six years to choose one line for the blank granite. Each month the debit buys the one she could afford instead. On the renewal it reads She made every room warmer.
At the gate the tablet syncs. Behind her, silence. Every wrist has gone home.
Someone keeps replacing the card the rain takes: LETTERING. HONEST PRICES. NO SUBSCRIPTION. She has read it each workday since spring.
The younger one does a plate's voice, the wrong year. She laughs with her mouth full and turns from the stones. Her own rule, that one.
She takes the lettering card. In her coat it softens against her hip.