Sect Year 7 · eleventh month · night of day 9 · the sixty-fifth life: Oster Bend, his sixty-ninth year
Oyla was old when Benn came to sit with her, and she had outlived most of the cloth row. The dyes had gone out of her hands years before. Her hair had turned from grey to white the slow way, one strand at a time, until no one could say when it had finished. She sat in a chair beside her front door with a shawl across her knees, and the door was the same door he had hung for her when he was twenty-three.
For more than forty years it had slammed at dusk. Benn had heard it from his own bench across the row, and from his own bed on the nights the wind came off the river. He had never once heard it without thinking of the pencil writing on the inside of the frame. She had never let anyone plane it again. She had never let anyone oil the hinge. Each evening she put her hand on the latch, pulled the door in, and let it go, and the crack went out across the lane. The neighbours had stopped complaining years before, the way people stop noticing a river.
