Sect Year 2 · fourth month · day 2 · the rim of Sallow Basin · the unnumbered life, seen from the rim: a river village, her thirty-first year
The rim showed Lin the well first. It showed him everything in a life that way, all at once and none of it his. The first thing it showed him that morning was the well, which was the first thing to ask anything of the woman who drew from it.
The well stood at the end of a lane under a roof of split reed: a stone shaft as wide as a cart wheel, with a rail of grey wood laid across its mouth on two posts. Two buckets hung from the rail on cords. The cords had been knotted so many times that the knots had become part of their weight, and one bucket was dented on its side from a drop onto stone. A man had mended the rail’s pin the night before. In the cold light the wood still looked too new, pale where the wedge had gone in.
The woman put her hand on the rail. It was wet. Cool breath came up the shaft carrying the smell of river mud, and the rim let Lin feel what she felt in her palm, the thought she had every morning. That the well was full, and that she had been lucky.
