Count the Lights. Odd Means You Go Inside.
the treeline, thursday
A letter, from a reader out past a landing I won't name:
“The lights used to keep to the treeline. Every night now they arrange a little closer to the camp. Last Thursday they made my initials. My cousin says swamp gas. Beau, swamp gas doesn't know my initials.”
Regular readers know I don't editorialize. I put the story down, I let you weigh it. Tonight I am breaking my own rule, because the old people in three different parishes gave me the same rules word for word, decades apart, and rules that stable are load-bearing:
Do not wave back. Do not compliment them. They keep that. Count them: if the number is even, close the curtains and put the coffee on, and pay them no mind. If the number is odd, you go be somewhere with people, tonight. And you do not carry a lantern out to look, because they will think it is one of theirs, and they miss it. They have been missing it a long, long time.
I don't know what the lights are. I know the rules work, because the folks who follow them are the ones still complaining about the lights. This one is true. Follow the rules.
In Truth and Terror.
— Beau
