The Debt I Was Born Into

Magic in this country is lent, never owned. Every working is borrowed against somebody's remaining years, and the lender has to agree out loud, with a hand flat on the book, in front of a clerk.

Nobody ever asked me.

I was born already owing. Twenty-two years, forty-one pieces, three years and nine months of my life simply gone, taken out of the middle instead of off the end, because the one thing that could have reached the end of me was a word I never said.

I am a copyist. I cannot read my own account. So I built one, line by line, out of what nine women remembered carrying to a door.

And when I finally found out who all of it has been keeping alive, it was the only person in this town who has ever been kind to me.

She is my sister.

Nobody asked her either.

There is one way into that building. It costs the rest of my life.

I am going to take it, and then I am going to walk up that road and ask her the question nobody has ever asked a single one of us.