Sect Year 2 · fourth month · day 4 · the rim of Sallow Basin · the unnumbered life, seen from the rim: a river village, her sixtieth year
The rim gave Lin the village’s last twenty years in one long draw. The village emptied over those years, slowly at first and then all at once. First the families with small children went, down the valley road toward the coast. There, the wagon drivers said the wells were deep enough to outlast any dry year. Then the families with old parents went, and they left the old parents to the rope and the rail.
The woman stayed at the well. Nobody asked her to leave. The men who once would have carried her to a cart now only nodded to her across the lane while they loaded their own, and she nodded back, and that was the whole of the argument.
In the first spring after the flood she carried a flat stone up from the ford, one of the grey ones the water had worn smooth. Then she set it on the bank where the rope had come back up the mud with nothing on the end of it. She didn’t cut a name into the stone. There was no one left in the lane who would read a name, and she didn’t think the mud was owed one. She sat on the bank beside it for a while with her knees drawn up and her good arm around…
