The Source Awning

Two mornings later the county awning doubled in width.

Not by much. Enough to make its intention plain.

Reader Pei kept the notice post. Beside him now sat a second table, lower, meaner, set with ink, sand, and a stack of narrow slips cut to the size of ferry tallies.

Liao took that seat.

Above him county had hung a new board:

SOURCE EXAMINED HERE

The lane hated the words before understanding them. That helped nothing.

By first bell three people had already stepped under the board, not from love of county, but because the city had taught them to fear old lines and borrowed mornings more than they feared ink.

One carried a cuff. One carried only a sentence. One carried a body with no words at all and wanted county to say whether the lane should trust the woman speaking beside him.

Liao's method was almost gentle.

"Whose hand?" "What morning?" "What body?"

The same three questions. Now slowed, numbered, sanded, and placed on slips that could be kept.

When the answer satisfied county's thin threshold, he wrote source examined across the top and signed beneath with a clerk's hook too small to be useful anywhere except later.

That later was the whole danger.

Xu saw it first in its clearest shape.

"They are building a road after the road. One that can be filed."

Sun answered without looking up from the bench.

"Not after. Under."

Bao wanted to hate the board. Instead it fascinated him.

The slips were so narrow, so confident in their own smallness, that they seemed almost honest.

"Could we do one?" he asked.

"No," said Marta and Gao together.

The boy subsided, though not inwardly.

At midmorning the awning caught its first true fish.

A Stone Mouth woman arrived carrying a spoken correction from Nian about second landings in rain: old marks void after third bell if no body has crossed.

At the lane mouth the sentence would have taken five voices and a quarrel to stand upright. Under county's board it took Liao six questions, one look at the woman's river hands, and Pei's distant recognition of Nian's name.

He wrote the slip.

By noon three carriers were repeating the correction as though county had discovered it.

That injury landed in Marta's throat like grit.

The road had spoken first. County had merely taught the city a cleaner posture for hearing it. Now the cleaner posture would be remembered as origin.

Lin came in from White Heron just in time to hear one boy say, "It is true. County examined it."

He nearly struck the post.

"Nian examined it first in rain two days ago. County only arrived dry enough to copy."

The boy looked ashamed. Not persuaded.

Not truth. Priority.

By late bell the slips had begun moving farther than the stool could reach with voice.

One reached dye lane. One reached the ferry release line. One was folded into a widow's cuff so carefully it looked like a relic.

Marta crossed to the awning with Lin and asked to see the Stone Mouth slip.

Liao held it just out of reach long enough to remind them whose side of the table they occupied.

hand: Nian by named carrier morning: second dawn after rain count body: no landing honored after third bell without present crossing body

Marta felt two things at once.

Admiration. Revulsion.

The slip was exact. It began a file Shen would later be able to read backward into route, habit, and trusted mouths.

"You are building his map for him," Lin said quietly.

Liao did not deny it.

"The city insists on asking for source. Source leaves writing."

He was right in the most hateful way.

At dusk a woman from the ash yards came with no slip, only a living question and a body beside her. She paused between stool and awning so long Gao finally shouted, "Pick your disappointment and get inside it."

The woman chose the bench.

Marta loved her for choosing present bodies over durable paper at the last possible moment.

After dark Bao stood in the empty lane and looked at the new county board.

"If they can examine source, what is left for us?"

Marta looked at the bench, the stool, the gate, and the people who still came there because living faces could be argued with in time.

"The part that changes while it is being heard," she said.