How limited, even sour a prospect, though.

One may, oh, cook poorly, or be socially graceless, or invest unwisely, or fail to achieve the best of personal hygiene. But one doesn’t want to live wrong-from breath to breath, from start to finish, to get it wrong, so wrong, so fully wrong, that one has never had the glimmer of an idea that it might be better. Or does one? Maybe if you’re going to get it that wrong, it’s better to get it all wrong. The proverbial stupid ant crawling on the hat brim of the prophet, eager only for the shade behind the prophet’s left ear, and ignorant of the civilization-altering sermon it is witnessing.

8

T HE ACOLYTES of the Clock of the Time Dragon banged cooking utensils into dirty kettles, tying up their sleeping rolls. Their anxiety at the sound of distant cannon was obvious through their overeager laughter. Boys in the neighborhood of war.

“We’re pulling up stakes here, Missy Morosey,” called the sergeant-at-hand, but when she didn’t arise to hurry to them, he just cursed under his breath and continued knotting ropes to secure the carriage. There was too much to be done to waste his breath trumpeting at her when she decided to go deaf.

Her back was turned to them, her head bent as if listening to an interior argument. She was alone in the way that the terminally ill, crowded into an institution, are alone. Had she a mirror to study her own features, she’d have noted with approval the early silvering of her hair, the spatter of liver spots on the edge of her temple. These would have helped her overlook that her skin still glowed, almost as if backlit, with the enviable sheen of youth.

But she wouldn’t have a mirror. She cared to see in her own face neither shades of the hopeful child she’d been nor glimpses of the schemingly wanton maiden she’d become. In recent years, she had bridled at compliments-“How like a sylph you are! How maidenly!”-as if the efforts to survive her calamities and do useful work had proven incapable of maturing her.

The clearing was striped with oakhair strands. They’d been vibrating earlier, but as night drew near, the winds lapsed, the music stilled. It was almost time for a candle, but she didn’t want to go back to her cohorts at the wagon. Bellow though they might, they wouldn’t leave without her.

She balanced a pen in her hands, musing.

She had been trying for years to write, but even when she managed a line or two, she couldn’t or wouldn’t use the personal pronoun. The habit of alibi prevented her. Anyway, she was no longer convinced that she possessed a character so resolved it could boast about itself: I, I, I! When she did write it, it was followed by a period. I. It might as well be her initial, as in “I. sat alone in the way that the terminally ill, crowded into an institution, sit alone.”