Winter kept the district office busy. In the last week of the year the printing office pasted the third edition of the table on the wall, chest high, where the women with baskets stop on their way to market. Five columns we knew. CORRECT. LEFT IN THE UNSURE BOX. COST. WHAT WE DID NOT TRY. And the district's own last column, which had no name and held numbers nobody could check.
The sixth column was new. Its header was three words: STILL TRUE? Under it, in the small type you only see if you stand close, the printer had set one line: To be filled each quarter. Notify your station clerk of any change.
Merta read it twice. Then she read out the four lines the printer had sent down with the ink still wet. Third edition is on the machine. There is one more column. Nobody told me who ordered it. The order came with the paper.
"Who adds a column?" the eldest said.
"Someone with a stamp," Merta said. "That is all a stamp means."
We stood in front of it a long time. The column was not asking whether the machine still read letters. It was asking whether a number we had earned in October was still ours in December. Nobody in the district had ever asked that in print.
"Fill it," Merta said. "That is what a column is for."
"With what?" the eldest said. "A test. And the only letters it has never been shown are in the tin on the high shelf."
One hundred letters. Wax on the lid. A nail through it. The rule we wrote in the autumn: these are never taught, and the next review opens them first.
"If we open it now," the youngest said, "it stops being a test. If we leave the column empty, empty reads as no."
"Then empty reads as no," the eldest said, "and we write why underneath."
He cut a card. On the top half he wrote 84. On the bottom half he wrote: true as of the last week of October, counted by her hand, checked by mine. He pinned it under the printed column, so that for a few days the wall carried one number that brought its own date with it. People stopped. Some read the top half. A few read the bottom.
In January the grey technician came back with a dial.
"Workshop changed the step," he said. "Same dial for every station now. Not my workshop. The one that makes the dial."
"Why now?" the eldest said.
"Ask them." He fitted it, wiped his hands, and then, because he was not a cruel man, took a folded note out of his coat. It was in a hand we knew, small and level, the kind that writes numbers without leaning on them. It said: It is not the line that moved. The room moved.
Two things had happened in the same week. The dial had turned, and the district had repainted the house numbers with two extra digits at the end, so that a street we had counted a thousand times now wore a shape the machine had never been shown. Nobody announced either one. Both were printed somewhere, in a column of small type, on a page nobody at the station was sent.
We ran the common sack, one hundred letters, the same hundred for all three stations, sealed and numbered, and wrote the number on the bench. 76.
Not 84. Nothing in the machine had got worse on purpose. It had been taught on a room, and the room had been repainted, and the step it moved by was chosen by someone we could not name.
Merta did not say again. She stood with her pencil behind her ear and looked at the wall for a while.
"So the column is right," she said. "That is the worst of it."
The youngest turned the examples ledger to a clean page and ruled three columns. WHAT THE NUMBER WAS. WHAT IT IS. WHAT MOVED IT, AND WHO. In the first line she wrote: 84, 76, the step and the street.
"Now we can answer the column," she said. "Not with a word. With a date and a reason."
On the back of her own copy, Merta wrote four words in the margin beside the new column, in the small hand she uses for things she does not want read out loud: notified: no one.
The district clerk came in the last week of January, a young man with a satchel and a list, to see the column filled. Merta put him on the bench and asked the eldest to read the new column aloud.
He read: STILL TRUE?
"One word," the clerk said. "Yes or no. The column is not wide."
The eldest took the pen, wrote 84 in the column, and under the line wrote the date. "A number without a date is an opinion," he said. "You have my opinion. I have given you the day I had it."
The clerk looked at the wall, then at Merta, then wrote something in his own book. We never learned what.
That night we did a thing that was in nobody's method. We hung a second card behind every card on the wall, the old number, the date it was true, the reason it stopped, so that the wall could be read backwards, and a person standing at it could see not only what we say now but what we said before and why we stopped saying it.
The printing office has already told Merta that in the spring it will print a fourth edition and take the third one down. The wall will hold one sheet. The wall will forget. So we keep the stack behind it.
Our father said nothing all winter. He sat at the head of the table the way a shelf stands in a hallway: load-bearing, silent, not asked.
Our mother watched the child rule the three columns, and then she said the thing we wrote at the top of the page and have not rubbed out since. "A question with a date is not the same as a question asked once."
The child is still counting how long a number stays true after it leaves this house. She has one answer so far: less than a season. She says she will need more winters to know the shape of the falling.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. The family is invented; the milestones it lives through are not.