Sect Year 4 · third month · night of day 26 · the thirty-fifth life: Ketch Shoal, her fifty-ninth year
Tovra counted the notches every night before she slept. She had begun doing it when she was young, the way other women said a prayer over a cradle, and she had never stopped. She stood at the post with the lamp turned low and laid her palm on the wood, and she went down the cuts one at a time, touching each with the pad of her thumb. She didn’t need her eyes for it. The lamp only let her see that her hand was where it ought to be.
Forty. She had forty now. The newest row ran from the height of her shoulder to the top of the post, and the oldest cuts she could still find had worn to ridges under her skin. Above the fortieth there was a space of bare grey wood, the width of two fingers, that she hadn’t yet filled. She didn’t hurry toward it. It would be filled when there was something to fill it with.
Her husband’s hair had gone white in the last few winters, all at once, as though the sea had drawn the colour out of him over one hard season. He had built a second net-loft over the first, because the nets had grown too many for one, and he had laughed at himself while he did it. Some nights she heard him moving above her, shifting…
