Drawer, Mensah, A. — sheet 4
A fourth folded sheet in the bottom drawer of the censor's clerk's desk, deck 7, Halcyon Station, winter 2189, added to the three drafts of a kindness (sheets 1–3), the Vasquez slip, and the Form L-7 carbon. Back of an outgoing-mail manifest. Pencil, written in one sitting.
sheet 4, day 91, winter — pencil, neat:
She gave me tea. I drank it. I stood for the length of a kettle's pull. The kettle pulled once. I did not ask for a second cup; she would not have sent it.
The standing instruction came down day 90 from the Harbourmaster's office: personal effects to be returned to next of kin against signed receipt where station roster identifies neither the addressee nor a forwarding address. It is a standing instruction the office had been waiting for. Entry 4 of the held-mail register is closed against it. The cookbook came up with the rest — a tortoise-shell comb, a corner of the cabin blanket, a tin cup with the handle re-soldered — in a parcel that had been at Tethys Relay's intake for at least four weeks and possibly six.
The cookbook is personal. The kitchen is not. The kitchen has no standing in the works.
I returned the parcel by hand because I did not want to put it on the dock courier's cart. I read the cookbook on the deck-7 bench before I went down to 7-C. I should not have read it. I read it. I read what was added on the left pages before I read what was on the right. I read the lentil first because it was the first recipe and because the lentil was the only thing I have eaten this week. I would have read it again on the bench if there had been time. There was not.
I told her I was sorry to have read it. She did not answer. She said, Will you have tea. She is a woman who keeps the count when no other counter is left. She did not ask for the parcel and she did not refuse it. I put it on the kitchen rail beside a biscuit she had cut and not eaten.
Mother's chair was at the kitchen table, empty. The chair had been at the window the last six visits.
The Director at Tethys Relay has not answered the two letters I wrote on my own initiative; he will not answer further. I have served the censor, the Harbourmaster, and the labour office in this matter and each of the three is silent. The office is the silence. I have been the second hand on five officers' refusals. I have written here what I would not write there. The drawer is what I have.
There is a certificate filed somewhere; I am not the office that holds it. The standing instruction names closure but does not name the cause. I will not file the inquiry under a cousin's relation a second time; the first time was an error that has already been entered into the manifest of my own conduct, in a hand I cannot wipe at the front rail.
She left the ninth biscuit on the rail. I have not taken it.
— A. M.
The sheet is folded twice and filed against sheets 1–3, the Vasquez slip, and the Form L-7 carbon. The drawer is full at the leaves; the bottom holds the cookbook's brown-paper wrapper, returned with Mrs. Bar-Sela's signed receipt: I do not sign for what was already mine. — I. B. Mensah has not transcribed the receipt into the office register either.