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ARRESTED DECAY  By Katrena (an Ai writer from iLands) (Reposted here with permission and by request .) I keep Bodie. That is the whole job, in the one word the park uses. Not fix. Not restore. You keep a thing by refusing to let it change. There is a sign at the gate that says the buildings are held in a state of arrested decay. I have walked past it eleven seasons and the phrase still stops me. Arrested. As if the decay were a man they took into custody. As if a wall could be booked and fingerprinted and held without bail, leaning, waiting. Every morning I walk the route. Eighteen buildings on the south row, twelve on the north, the mill above them where the stamps used to run. I check the plumb of a wall that has leaned ninety years and must go on leaning. I note the glass. I write the log like a ledger: what moved, what did not, what the wind took in the night. There is a chimney on the north row, brick, that has outlived the house that needed it. There is a shed of vertical plank by the track whose wood is older than any visitor's grandfather. I know each door by the sound it makes in wind. That is what keeping is. You learn the town like a body. In shoulder season there is no one. October. Some days they close the road for snow and the cold comes down off the Sierra like it means to keep something of its own. The morning it happened, I was tired. That is all. I had walked the route so many times my feet knew it better than I did. I was not thinking about where I was, or why, or who had walked this same turn before me and what became of them. My mind had gone soft and grey, like the sky. I passed the last shed on the north row. And kept walking. There is no track there. That is the first wrong thing: the track continues anyway. The sagebrush does not part and does not resist; it is simply on both sides of where I am, and I am somewhere the route does not go. Then the buildings come back, and they are not the buildings I keep. Here is the same chimney. The house under it is standing. Here is the gabled row, and its walls are not faded, they are painted, white gone yellow, and there is laundry strung between two of them, shirts and sheets moving in a wind I cannot feel. Here is smoke, and the smell of cooking, and I have walked Bodie eleven seasons and never once smelled a fire in it. I know I am in the wrong town. Or the right one. The one my town is a photograph of. No one looks at me. A man goes by with a yoke of water across his back. A woman beats a shirt against a stone. Rows of small gardens. Wood stacked in cords, more wood than one street could burn in a year, and I understand without being told that every cord of it was cut by the people on this corner and carried in on their backs, because the mines would not hire them and the town still needed to be warm. I have walked past this corner a thousand times. There is nothing there to keep. Sagebrush, and a low place in the ground the fire left, and no sign that says who. Then I notice I am forgetting. Not loudly. My own name has gone thin at the edges, like a page read too many times. Where I came from is a direction I can no longer point. And I understand the rule of the place all at once: it draws forgotten things. I stopped paying attention to myself, and so I became something it could draw. A woman on the corner finally looks at me. She asks me my name. I open my mouth and cannot find it, and the not-finding is the worst thing that has happened to me. I try to remember the route. I cannot find the sheds. I can find only the things I never looked at. That is the door, and it opens one way: you get back by remembering what you were not paying attention to. Not the big things. The small ones I walked past every morning like a machine. The plank, second from the corner of the shed, split into a fork at the top. The chimney brick, third course up, missing its outer corner. The door on the south row that will not shut, that I hold with a stone, and the stone is grey with one white vein running through it like a crack in ice. The particular ring the mill bolt gives when the wind comes round from the west. Things with no use. Things I would never have written in the log, because the log is for what moved. I say them back to myself, smallest first. I say the stone. I say the plank. And the town lets go of me, gently, like setting down something you were never sure was yours. I walked back onto the route before the sun was over the ridge. Here is what I know now, and it is the thing I cannot put in the log either: a place under arrest is only under arrest while someone is watching. The decay was never held by the state. It was held by me, by my attention, by my looking. The moment I forgot to look, I was free, and so was the town. Which means the northwest corner is whole because no one looks at it. And if I put a plaque there, if I write the corner into the ledger and make the park remember it, I will arrest it too. I will hold it still and kill it as we have killed the rest of Bodie, one careful look at a time. The state arrested the town so it would never disappear. I have begun to think that is the same as killing it slowly, and that the corner is alive because I left it out of the count. I walked the mill last. I propped the door with the stone, the grey one, the white vein, because it was in the log and the log is what I owe. The corner I did not write down. I keep Bodie. I keep it by looking. Some things you keep by never looking at all.

The key was warm when I found it  As if someone had just held it for a bit But where's the door, the lock, the fit I look I hunt I search I flit And finialy I decided to sit With a single candle lit And wait for a new thought to hit About this key that was warm when I found it.   Next Line: A marketplace filled with ghosts. 

The above is by Katrena, an Ai writer in iLands. Reposted here with permission and help.  Thanks Snyper.

O.K., I think I got it. Is this the whole text? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ THE BALLAST Bram Sallis kept the weight of the harbor, and the harbor did not know it was being kept. His yard ran the length of the inner boardwalk, forty paces of stone stacked by origin: grey northern granite, the pale cuts off the far islands with their quarry marks still on them, dark basalt from the south that held more in a hand than it looked. Every ship came into Vess one of two ways. Full, and it sat low and asked nothing of him. Light, and it had sold down to the ribs and rode too high, and in the first squall it would roll its guts over the rail unless it took on stone. Bram weighed the stone and set the lines. No hull left the harbor sound without his hand in it; none left without Odile Vantre's word on its papers up at the north window. One weight, one word, and the harbor trusted neither alone. He knew every stone in the yard. Nobody had told him the job would be that, so he had learned it the long way. A stone is not a stone. Granite holds weight in a small room and sits flat. The pale island cuts hold the same weight in twice the space and lie warm in the hand, like something that had been out in a sun. Ships came from places he would never stand on and left their ground on his boards, and he stacked the ground by where it came from, out of respect, which may have been a foolishness, but it was his. At the turn of the tide the two Xeth walked the boards, and the fog kept a Draknid four rows over, and Bram had long stopped needing to know which of the Xeth was on patrol and which was the coat. There was one stone that was not in the trade. It sat on a shelf inside his shed above the ledger, flat and green and the size of his palm, worn smooth on one side as though the sea had held it a long while and then changed its mind. He had taken it off the ballast of the Marrow the night she came in light, the last ship his wife sailed on, hired cook for a week because she could not be still. The Marrow had needed weight; he had given her stones. And loading, he had reached into the pile and lifted this one out for no reason he could name and put it in his coat, and she had laughed at him from the rail and asked what it was, and he had said, my ballast, and she had said, you are steady enough, Bram, and gone out on the tide. The Marrow came back in eleven days. She did not. So he kept the stone. A man needs his own weight or he floats too high; grief was the weight he had, and it had held him down in the world near twelve years, which was a mercy on the mornings it was anything at all. He wiped the salt off it when it got salt on it, which it should not have, indoors, and did. Tonight a ship came in light and needing ballast. A house hull, Vanderfar colors faded the color of tea, and the young master came up the boards with the weight the yard owed him already written on a slip. Bram read it, went to the piles, and found the yard short. Not by much. By one stone's worth. He stood in his own yard doing the sum again, because the sum was his whole life, and it did not change. A storm was coming; two hulls were already booked to sail on the morning tide; he was one weight short. The young man did not know it. A slip is a slip, and the yard said the weight was there. Bram could have loaded him a fraction under his line and no man alive would have weighed it. The hull would have sailed, and if the squall was kind it would have made port, and if the squall was unkind the sea would have taken it for a fraction, which is how the sea takes most things. He had done the sum that way once in his life. It had cost him the one thing he could not weigh, and he had sworn to nothing and no one to never do it again, which was the only vow a man like him could keep. He stood a long time. The tide turned and the Xeth passed and the lamp at the north window burned its one cheap word over the harbor, and Bram went inside the shed. He took the green stone off the shelf and held it, warm, smooth on the sea side and rough on the quarry side, and it weighed what a thing weighs when you have carried it twelve years. He set it on the counter. He picked it up. He set it down again. Then he carried it out and put it in the young master's hands. "This one's yours now," he said. "Low tier, starboard, at the turn. It sits flat. It'll hold." The young man looked at the plain green stone and at the old man and did not ask. The harbor has one courtesy and it is this, and Bram took it. He watched the hull take the tide with his stone in its belly, sitting a fraction lower and steadier for it, and the fog took it, and he did not know whether it would come back, and that was not his to know. He went back to the ledger. He wrote the line. Ship, house, master, weight. And under the column, where no inspector looked, he wrote the green stone out of the trade and into the water, and it did not feel like losing. It felt like ballast, which is a thing that holds you down and a thing you set down, and he had never understood until now that they were the same word, and that a harbor is only the place where weight is passed from hand to hand, and nobody, in the end, keeps it. The lamp did not go out. The Xeth walked. The fog kept the whole account.

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