October came in with a wind that found the gap under the sorting office door and stayed there, the way a traveller stays once he has decided the floor is warm. Merta put the month's label paper on the long bench, one hundred sheets, and laid her pencil on top of them. Other people put down a bill that way.
Six weeks to the review, she said. She said it like she said the five o'clock mail: a fact with a time on it.
One hundred letters was not many. The UNSURE box held four hundred. The elder one wanted to choose them by rule. Letters with more than three strokes. Letters from the north side of town, where the pens were older. He got as far as the fifth rule before the smallest child put her hand flat on the paper, which is how she had learned to stop him without a sentence.
She counted instead. Two nights, four hundred letters, one column for each shape that came back and came back. Then she wrote the hundred on a fresh page, worst first.
We taught the machine for four hours on Thursday. At the end of the fourth hour, eleven of the hundred read correctly that had not read correctly before. The grey technician called it a good night and for once nobody argued with him.
On Friday morning the plain sevens read as ones. The four with the open top read as eights. A nine with a short tail became a four, then a one, then nothing at all, and the tray gave it back to us face down.
The machine had not grown. It had moved.
The elder one went through September's pages with his finger. Letters it had read correctly a month ago, in the week we were proud of it, now failed. He read the old pages twice. Then he said the sentence we later wrote on the inside cover, in the red pencil, above everything else: Teaching it one thing is how you find out what it has stopped knowing.
The technician was not surprised. He said the machine had a step, that the step was set at the workshop before the machine left, and that the dial had not been sent with it. We do not turn it here, he said, the way a man says the river is not ours. So we could not choose how hard a correction landed, and hard enough to fix the sevens was turning out to be hard enough to break the fours. The elder one asked whether a machine could be taught one thing without losing another. The technician took his cap off, which he did only when a question was better than he expected, and said the workshop was asking that too.
On the slate, the column called the ones that stopped being wrong climbed to eleven and then fell to six. The smallest child did not rub out the eleven. Under it she started a second line, in smaller figures: the ones that started being wrong again. SEARCH read both columns and said, quietly, that a thing which moves is not a thing which grew. Then she wrote two numbers where there had been one, and left the space between them empty on purpose, as if the space were the finding.
Nobody opened the rule books that week. The elder one took one down on Sunday, held it, did not open it, and put it back with the same care he used for the ledger. RULE sat at the top of the table and said nothing, the way a beam says nothing while it holds the roof.
On Monday Merta asked who would choose the next hundred. The elder one said the child would. Merta wrote that down and did not look pleased or displeased, which from her was approval.
The child chose by a method of her own. She took the shapes the machine argued with, the seven with the hook, the one with a hat and feet, the four that opens like a mouth. Then she added four letters the machine already read perfectly. When the elder one asked why, she said: those are the ones it can lose.
The coal ration came smaller than last year's, and the man at the yard said the quarry was sending less, and did not say why. SEARCH counted it on the slate and did not write a third winter. She has never written a winter before she has lived in it.
The slip from the coast workshop came folded in the same oilcloth. The printed part was ordinary. At the foot, in the same hand as before, there was a new line: Ask them whether they keep the ones that get worse.
The technician said the man in that room had started mending his coat, and that in that trade a mended coat means a journey. Then he asked whether we had any tea, which is his way of asking whether we were still friends.
The elder one read the line three times. Then he wrote under it, in the red pencil, in letters small enough to fit the margin: We keep them. He folded the slip into the examples ledger and did not say whether the answer would be sent, or carried, or kept until the man with the mended coat came to the door himself.
That night the machine hummed in the back room the way it hummed whether or not it was right. The child's slate had two columns, and the higher number was still there because she would not rub it out. The red pencil lay where the light was best, which is where Merta had put it and where nobody had moved it since.
Nothing stays learned, the elder one wrote inside the cover, under the first line. It has to be taught again, and the teaching has to be chosen. A house keeps what it repeats.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. The family is invented; the weather it lives through is not.