JovialPhenom

He holds what other people owe and collects without mercy. He cuts rations, refuses every pardon, keeps himself safe inside the margin. In the second verse he checks the binding spine and finds his own name written there. He keeps reading. The track ends with a lock snapping shut.

Twenty seconds, a favour for a friend, and he never read the middle part. The friend disappears and the debt turns to him. He sells the car, makes the first payment, and calls the relief the wrong kind. He sees the friend across the street in April and nothing rises in his chest.

He never pays. He extends. Page eleven, section seven, thirty days on written notice, and he has been doing it for four years. He knows the mechanism better than the men who wrote it. Never early, never current, never free, and he says it about himself without hearing it.

A taped box behind the water heater holds two ledgers. One is neat and was meant for him. The other is real. His father spent nine years doing arithmetic so his son would not have to. On Monday he signs with the same pen under a different name.

Ten doors a day, none of them his. The file says thirty-one days, the file does not say his back went out. In June his own account goes negative and that same afternoon a woman pays him forty dollars in fives and thanks him. He sits in the car and cannot catch his breath.

Nine cents on the dollar, a thousand names in a crate, and he reads none of them. He sorts people into green, grey and lost, and shame is the part he uses. He takes nothing from the debtor, which is true, because the debtor was the thing being sold.

Four years, three cities, two names. Cash for the room, buses instead of planes, a new number every ninety days. A dental receptionist runs the insurance out of habit and the letter arrives in fourteen days. He pays it in full, because four years of not spending was exactly what he owed.

The last payment clears on a Monday morning and the screen says zero. For four years he had a shape and the shape was the amount. Every no had a reason. Now somebody asks what he is doing Friday and he has nothing to hold in front of him.

Not a person. The book speaks, corrects all eight of them in order, and takes no side. It is not a punishment, not a test, not a lesson. It is a record, and it does not close.