It’s almost worse than a sentence, not having one. The girls set to hang are set to hang in three days’ time.

‘Am I to be hung with them?’ I ask the turnkey through the bars, but it’s like he’s turned to stone. ‘Should I ready myself?’

Not that there’s much for us to ready. Winnie promises her shoes to one of the whores if she’ll eat her sins. Unless they’re rich, folk in jail get the Simple Eating that’s saved for those who can’t confess before they die. The whore says no.

‘But your soul is already lost,’ argues Winnie. ‘It can’t do you harm. It’s not much. Just the stealing and some lies; I swear it.’

The other whore shakes her head before Winnie even asks. ‘No folk can look at a sin eater. No folk’ll touch her. How am I to work if I’m not seen or touched?’

The rat girl is more successful. She offers a coin to the dog eater to bring a locket to her sister. She promises another coin from the sister when it’s done.

‘Won’t be till next autumn,’ the dog eater warns. She’s in jail through spring and summer, which is as long as it’ll take her family to pay off her fine.

‘Not like to go bad,’ says the rat of the locket, and places it in the dog eater’s hand. I smile at the jest, but her eyes glaze past mine.

I pass the following day thinking on my da. How he lay on the bed with the blue patched quilt over him shaking and shivering after he cut his hand fixing the town’s mill. How I called the doctor to come, but the doctor just looked him up and down and said there wasn’t anything I had money enough for him to do. How Da asked me to tell him about what I saw from the window and didn’t mind when I talked through my every noticing, even the ones like clouds that changed shape as they passed. How I couldn’t bear to call the sin eater and so left it too late. One morning as I warmed the milk, Da shrank away from himself, leaving a husk and me all alone. His shadow stayed in the house for weeks. It wasn’t dark like a shadow, just an empty place in the shape of my da. I would see it out of the side of my eye and turn knowing he should be there. But when I looked there wasn’t anything.

The hardest was not having folk to say my noticings to, like if I saw a spider when I rinsed my hands in the basin. Or how I could make river waves by whipping the edge of dry bedclothes up and down, up and down.