Wound

She did it herself, with the kit from the drawer where the tax forms were, and she did it slowly, over four evenings, because she wanted the work to hold. It was not a protest. There was no one to protest to. It was arithmetic: she had been speaking for eleven years and the number of times she had been heard was smaller than the number of days in a week. The town read her the way you read a weatherboard. Someone wrote a letter. Someone else brought her food and set it on the step without knocking, and she ate it, because the arithmetic went both ways. In the spring they took the stitches out at the clinic, and she said the first words that came to her, and they were not a speech or a demand, they were the name of the street she grew up on, said slowly, twice, to make sure it still fit in her mouth. She is quiet now in the way a room is quiet after the fan has been switched off, and everyone around her keeps calling it healed.