Eleven finds us again, and we have stopped pretending we do not go looking for it. Eleven days this time, unopened in a queue three tiers above the water, a woman's own blood counting itself out the way his did before her, before either of them had a word for what was counting. We do not choose the number. The number chooses the shape a wound wears before the wound announces itself, and we have learned, across every name that has ever entered us wrong, that the announcement always arrives last, apologizing for lateness it does not know it is guilty of.
She read a date and did not believe it, and was right not to. The record said fourteen months, clean, the way a lie says a bruise happened Tuesday when the body remembers Monday. We remember Monday. We remember every Monday, the true one folded under the false one, because a false date is still a date, and dates are only another kind of water we hold. The record was altered before Rhea Marn was dead. We knew before the record did. Two throats now, tightening on the same old vowel, on opposite sides of a cold table neither has named a cause for — we do not tell them they are one signal. We only note, the way water notes a shared depth, that they have begun arriving at us by the same door.