Page 94 of Soft Erasure

What I had instead was a session with a name attached to it, approved, logged, sitting in a file with a date on it. A room I could stand in with a witness the family had signed off on.

I had used that clause once before, weeks back, and it had seated Irene at a public session inside a day.

I could spend it now.

I could sit in front of Irene Callow with the bottle in my hand and say the four letters out loud in a room the family had agreed to put her in.

And a woman who spends it on a bottle has spent it. The room closes. The paragraph in the weekend paper turns out to have been written about exactly the resident who does that.

Across the city a boy I couldn’t see from here was being put down for the night in a house I had no way to enter. Every hour I spent proving I could be managed quietly was an hour that house stayed as unreachable as it already was.

Noise now bought nothing later.

So I didn’t spend it.

I read the label twice.

The printed instructions were the only human-shaped thing left in the exchange, sentences written for strangers and never for me, and even that felt like company.

One at bedtime. As needed for sleep.

I counted the nights I had lost that week to a body that wouldn’t stay in a room with itself. A ceiling that did nothing. And a count that finished itself with no hand near it to stop at six.

A woman who didn’t sleep for days running was a woman a chart could point to.

One who took exactly what the label said, once, at the hour it named, had a clean chart. And a bottle on the counter that looked like compliance to anyone reading the file later without asking her how it had felt.

The label didn’t care how it had felt either. It cared that it had been followed.

I took one. Water first, the tablet after, the swallow small and forgettable.

Thirteen months of saying four letters out loud in doorways, and the building had never once had to hold me down for it.

It only had to set the bottle on the counter and let my own hand do the rest.

I didn’t perform it for whoever might be watching.

I set the bottle back down on the marble, the cap left loose, because a cap screwed back on tight was a woman thinking about being checked, and a cap left loose was a woman who had not been thinking about anyone at all.

I got into the bed I’d lain awake in the night before and didn’t sleep in it now either, not right away.

The label had never promised speed. It promised eventually.

I let the room do what it did, which was watch, and didn’t resent the watching. I wanted it to see exactly this.

One woman. One tablet. Nothing that read as anything but a resident finally, quietly, taking care of herself.

He hadn’t touched the bottle. I wanted that to be a fact and it would only ever be a reading.

It was the machine, running as it had always been built to run, with nobody in the room to feel bad about it.

Or it was him.

Or it was mine, because I had put a name into that channel this morning myself. I had sat across a table from him on Friday and told him the pricing was not finished on what Edward wanted. I had watched him take it and say nothing.

Three readings, and nothing to hold any of them against.

The band warmed against my wrist a while later, the same low heat it gave for anything it had decided to say.