30.

Tomorrow’s deadline looms. She must list all her assets and debt. Estimate her spending on shampoo and conditioner. Add up the magazines. Cost out the price of gifts over a twelve-month period. Indicate her savings. Afterwards she is required to submit: an examiner, a judge. There is a building set aside for the purpose and she trembles to enter it.

Rather than hunched over her table, cudgeling her brains, she prefers to be outside where paper is an impossibility. Here are no receipts and half-remembered purchases, only the stores they were taken from, their windows square behind the ceaseless falling of rain.

She has no hat, no umbrella. Bareheaded she goes out into rain. Her hair takes the brunt of the weather, the brown deepening again to black as it twists imperceptibly into rope. Under its protection she hardly registers rain’s steady fall. Then a large wet plop falls on her head, soaking through, and lays a cold fingertip on her very scalp. She shudders, scowling, and shakes herself like a dog. Then hurries on.