Every family has a drawer it does not open. Ours has a tin, and the tin has a date on the lid, and nobody in this house may look inside it before that date. We will come back to the tin.
The review came in the last week of October, earlier than Merta had promised. She spent a morning scrubbing the bench with a rag and vinegar, which is how we knew she was nervous. The sorting office smelled of glue and cold iron. The machine stood in the back room with its glass eye and its hopper, and the technician had polished the brass until it looked like something that had been invited.
Two reviewers came from the district. The first was a woman with a ledger and a pen she did not put down. The second was a man in a gray coat mended at both elbows — good work, small stitches, the kind a person does for himself in a room with one lamp. He stood at the back and said nothing at all. Merta introduced him by no name, which we noticed and did not ask about.
They brought three sacks.
The first sack was our own letters, the ones we had taught the machine with, the hands we knew: the woman who wrote her sevens like a flag, the shop on the corner that wrote its numbers leaning left. The second sack came from a river district two hours south, letters we had never seen. The third was sealed with wax and string and a paper tag, and the woman with the ledger put her hand flat on it and said: nobody opens this until the last hour.
The eldest wanted to run the first sack twice. "We know how it does on those," he said. "It will look well."
"It will look well because we taught it those," said the smallest child. "If it has seen the answer, it is not a test."
Nobody had put it that plainly before. The room went quiet in the way rooms do when a sentence lands and stays.
So they ran the first sack, and the machine read nine of ten. They ran the river sack, and it read six. The woman with the ledger wrote the numbers down without comment. The man in the mended coat watched the hopper and not the numbers, which we thought strange then.
At the last hour they cut the string on the wax sack. Ten letters were drawn out of it by the woman herself, so that no one in our house could choose. The machine read five of ten.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Then the gray technician, who had been leaning in the doorway the whole time with tape around his fingers, said what he always said: "That is not a machine. That is a child."
The eldest did not answer him. He was looking at the river sack.
We knew that look. It was the look from the month of the labels, when he had wanted to teach harder on every letter the machine got wrong. The previous month had taught him what that cost. Teach it the river hands and the leaning sevens would soften; the machine would move, not grow. He had said so himself, in front of the technician, in a voice that did not enjoy saying it.
"We could teach it the river letters," he said slowly. "And then next autumn we would have nothing to measure with, because we would have taught it the test."
The smallest child was already at the shelf. She took an empty tin that had held nails, chose one hundred letters out of the day's ordinary post, sealed them inside with wax, and wrote the date on the lid. Then she put the tin on the high shelf where the promise ledger sat under its ring of keys, and said: "These it is never taught. Next year, and the year after, we open the tin first."
The woman with the ledger asked how many letters were enough. The child said she did not know. She said a hundred was what the tin held.
Then came the part we still talk about. Merta asked who would sign the seal. The child signed her name in a way that leaned. So the eldest took the red pencil, and on the paper tag he wrote his own name and the date under hers, and pressed his thumb into the wax. He signed a promise not to open a thing he very much wanted to open. It was the first document of his life that did not describe the world. It described only what he would not do to it.
The man in the mended coat came forward then. He had a small book, the size of a hand, and he opened it and asked one question, and he asked it of the child and not of the eldest.
"What do you keep?"
"The ones we did not show it," she said.
He wrote that down. He did not say who he was. Merta did not say either, and the woman with the ledger called the hour, and the sacks were taken away.
They kept the machine. Merta got her month, which she spent the way she spent everything, on the five o'clock van.
That night the first frost came. SEARCH stood at the window with her slate and did not write a third winter. She drew a line, and under the line she wrote a number, and the number was one hundred, and she looked at it for a long time.
The eldest sat at the table with the promise ledger in front of him. He did not open it. He put the red pencil down beside it, parallel to the spine, the way you put down a tool you will pick up again.
That is the whole of it. A machine that reads nine of ten on what it has been shown and five of ten on what it has not is not a bad machine. It is a machine that has told you exactly what it was taught. The trouble is that for years we had been asking the other question — is it good enough — when the question that decides everything is: good on what, and who chose the letters.
We keep a tin now. It is a small inheritance, and it is the only one in this house that grows larger every year.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. The family, the sorting office and its machine are inventions; the questions they meet are not.