Wash Night Had Company

The card said WASH.

Ane brought the child. Rell brought the treaty-line. Ors brought the pencil. Pell’s lung — the other Pell, the generator — ran forty minutes that would be fifty.

Then Ane counted.

“Eight extra feet,” she said.

Ors wrote it in the margin because Switzerland kept minutes.

The extra people did not wash. They watched the doors. One of them had a coat-stitch that wanted to be a mark.

Ane walked them off the spine with a basin and a look that had been used on worse arguments.

“This is soap,” she said. “You don’t buy soap from a menu.”

After, she told Yew, who told a sentence onward without writing a map.

Bee asked if the extra feet were a game.

“No,” Ane said. “And you will not tell anyone the hour. Hours are not toys.”