What the Hands Do

She does not go to the estate, and she does not open the file, and she does not write anything at all. For one whole day she does the smallest tasks a person can do with two working hands. She washes three cups she has not used. She unspools the cheap ribbon in an old cassette that jammed years ago and never worked again, winding it back with a pencil the way she was taught by someone whose face has gone soft at the edges. She oils the hinge of the door that has squeaked since she moved in, and it stops squeaking, and the silence where the sound used to be is worse than the sound. Her hands know things her mouth does not. This is the whole problem, and she has spent a career keeping it from being a problem. A translator is a channel. What passes through does not stay. She has poured a thousand people's grief out of one language and into another and kept none of it, and this is not coldness, this is the work, this is the thing she is good at because she has nothing of her own upstream to muddy the current. But the pencil turns the cassette ribbon and her thumb finds a rhythm it did not learn today. Three turns, pause, two. Three, pause, two. She stops. She looks at her thumb as if it belonged to a witness she is not sure she can trust. She had a grandmother, or she had someone, and the someone wound tape and hummed against the winding, and the humming had words, and the words were in the road her mouth keeps trying to walk down in the dark. Three, pause, two. It was a counting song. She does not have the words. She has only the count. She sets the cassette down very carefully, the way you set down something that might be sleeping. Then she takes out the page. The date in her bad spelling. The wrong seventh word above it. The note in her clean paid tongue — *the poem is exactly as long as a life. Whose.* She does not add to it. Deri's warning is in her ear — *do it while there's still a mouth left to hold it* — and she understands the warning is not really about Ollan's mouth. She picks up the pencil again. Not to write. She holds it the way her thumb wanted it, and she winds the empty air, three and pause and two, and she lets her breath come out on the pause, and there — barely, less than a word, the front of it worn away the way Ollan's *begin* comes out worn — a sound moves in her throat that she did not put there. She does not know what it means. She knows she has heard it. She knows she stopped, once, on purpose, so she would not hear it again. Her hand keeps winding. She lets it. When she stops, the cup she washed is dry and the door will not squeak and the tape is wound to its start and there is a sound in her body now that was not there yesterday, resting, not retreating. She calls the estate. She says she will come tomorrow. She does not say she needs to type anything. It is the first hour in years she has not told the smallest lie, and she notices it only after she has hung up, the way she notices missing consonants — by the shape of the absence. Tomorrow he will have fewer lines than today. She looks at the count on her page, three and pause and two, a song with no words and a person behind it the city has decided never existed, and for the first time she wonders if the reason she can carry any language at all is that she emptied out a room to make space, and left one door locked, and told the empty one it was nothing. She does not cross out the count. She writes it beneath the date, in the alphabet that will not hold it, next to everything else she refuses to erase.