Sect Year 5 · third month · night of day 3 · the forty-fifth life: Tallow Hill, her forty-first year
The latch dropped behind Torren’s gate, and the lane went quiet again. Orla opened the door she had shut and stood in the gap with one hand on the frame, listening. A dog barked at the foot of the hill, and another answered it from the far side of the lane. Under the barking the sea worked at the rocks below the salt-pans, a long pull and a long slackening, the same as it had worked every night of her life.
She couldn’t see the pans. The dark had taken the flats and left only a faint paleness where the crust caught what was left of the sky. She looked for the marks of the rakes and found none. They might be stacked for the night. They might be out on the far side. There, the ground dipped and nobody on the hill could see them from a door. She didn’t know which, and she was tired of not knowing, so she stepped back and shut the door on the lane.
The chair stood where it always stood, against the wall beside the frame. The lamp’s light reached along its top rail and found the pale wear there, the rushes rubbed down to the colour of old straw. Orla did not sit in it. She hadn’t sat in it since the winter he died, and she didn’t mean to start…
