Past Ten

One for sorrow, my grandmother said, and saluted. She never told me what you do for twelve.

I was at the table with my tea when the first one landed on the back fence. Friday, gray and wet, the radio mumbling the forecast. The magpie sat on the top rail and watched me through the glass like it was spying on me.

Old habits. I set the cup down and touched two fingers to my eyebrow, muttering the words Gran taught me before I could ride a bike. Morning, Mr. Magpie. How's your wife?

Gran saluted every lone magpie in her garden for sixty years, quick and low, like she were passing a secret across enemy lines. Be polite, she said, and they move along.

This one didn't move along. It sat with its wings folded, black and white with that bottle-green sheen, and didn't flinch when a van backfired at the top of the lane. Magpies are gabbers, highwaymen with wings. They don't sit still.

My phone buzzed. Deb.

"You coming Sunday, or is it deadline week?" she said instead of hello.

"Sunday. One o'clock."

She rang off. Deb drove Gran to dialysis every Friday for eleven years. Gran's two years dead, and Deb still calls at eight forty, like part of her hasn't been told. Rites for the dead, kept on the installment plan.

***

An hour later, at the post office, a second magpie sat on the roof of the car next to mine. Facing my window. Not the bins by the door, where the gulls mob anything edible.

Two for mirth.

At the supermarket, a boy was hauling carts out of the corral, red in the face, and a third magpie sat on the rail beside him, neat as a chess piece.

"Been there since open," he said. "Won't shift."

Magpies nest in thorn trees in spring. It was November.

The fourth was on the lamppost by my parking spot, and it turned its head to follow me as I loaded the trunk. Four for a boy. Four for a birth. Gran sang it one way, the internet another.

I do mortality tables for a living, pension funds and freight insurance, so I know one sighting isn't data. People see patterns in clouds. But magpies travel in twos and gangs. Everyone knows that, even people who never look up.

I drove home with the radio off, doing the arithmetic. Four birds, four stops, every one alone and every one facing me. Like a tally being kept.

***

Five was on the mailbox when I pulled in. Dead center of the flat top, head swiveling to follow the car up the drive. I sat with the engine running, watching it watch me.

Five for silver.

Six sat on the chimney pot of the Mathesons' place next door, empty since March. Nothing up there for a magpie: no food, no view worth the climb.

Six for gold.

I fetched the bags and counted my eleven steps to the door, keys between my knuckles. Gran's rule: a fist with metal in it counts double.

Mr. Ansel was washing his car across the street. He can spot a dandelion in my lawn from his porch, so I called to him.

"Lots of magpies about today."

He looked at the sky, then the wires. Shrugged.

"Usual for this time of year," he said, and went back to the suds.

One on my mailbox, one on the empty house, nothing anywhere in the sky he'd checked. I went in. Deadbolt, then the chain, which I'd never once used.

***

By one o'clock I'd built a spreadsheet I couldn't read. The numbers slid, like figures on glass someone kept breathing on.

The house had gone quiet in a way it never is. Fridge humming, radiator ticking. I swallowed and heard the whole mechanism of it, cartilage and all.

I told myself not to look, the whole way down the hall. My hand was on the blind before I reached the window.

Seven sat on the patio table. Eight was on the low branch of the oak, the one the old swing hung from when this was Gran's garden.

Seven for a secret never to be told. Eight for heaven.

They weren't doing anything. That was the thing. Birds are always doing something, pecking or preening. These two sat like ornaments, both turned to the window.

Watching me count them.

I let the slat fall. My legs carried me back to the office without consulting me.

Half of me said close every curtain. The actuary half said don't be absurd. Eight sightings, zero incidents.

But zero incidents proves nothing about a rhyme. The numbers are stops on a line, and a line always runs to its end.

I closed the blind and kept my back to it. But I went on counting. That was the part I couldn't stop. Somewhere under my ribs a small dutiful voice kept asking what nine would bring.

***

The light went sometime after four, and the windows turned to mirrors, me in every one. I stopped pretending to work and did my rounds. Back door, key. I armed the alarm, six digits of pi, from a year when I thought numbers were safe.

Then I remembered the whole rhyme.

Gran's version wasn't the internet's. Hers came from her mother, across the water, never a word softened. She sang it to me once, flour to the wrists, and stopped at seven.

"Why stop there?"

"The rest isn't for children," she said, and went back to her pastry.

I was nine that year. The rest I found myself, decades on, in a folklore archive. Eight for heaven. Nine for hell. Ten for the devil's own self.

I mapped the day, fence to oak, every bird nearer than the last. Plotted, they made a circle.

Closing around the house and around me.

***

By dusk I was on the office floor, back to the wall under the window. Call who? Deb, who'd ask if I'd been drinking?

My mouth had gone dry, so I went to the kitchen. I filled a glass at the cold tap and didn't drink it.

The back door has a little window, curtained on a wire, and the curtain doesn't quite meet. A sliver.

I looked through it. Of course I did.

The birdbath sits at the patio's far edge, older than me. Gran kept it full. I let it run dry in September.

Nine stood in the empty basin, still as its own shadow.

Nine for hell.

I set the glass in the sink, careful of noise, and went back down the hall.

The blind was shut. I knew what was out there, the way you know something waits behind a closed door. I parted the slats, two fingers this time.

Ten sat on the outer sill.

Close enough to count the whiskers at the base of its beak. Its eye held the lamp, and me in front of it, small and doubled.

Ten for the devil's own self.

Gran would have saluted it.

The rhyme was done. I knelt there, bracing for my chest to burst or the ceiling to come down on me.

The lamp hummed. Ten did nothing, went on doing nothing, while the garden went dark by inches.

I held my breath for as long as I could. Still nothing. I don't know what I expected it to do. Knock, maybe.

It watched me through the glass, patient as arithmetic.

The laugh came out of me sideways, like a hinge giving.

Ten birds. Zero incidents. The devil's own self had sat on my windowsill all evening and done nothing. I was still alive, and the rhyme was over.

I stood on legs gone to static and let myself breathe. Another laugh came, smaller.

The house was just a house again. Fridge hum. Dripping tap.

I'd call Deb and tell her the magpie story, and she'd call me a lunatic. Sunday I'd bring a pie, and by Christmas it would be a story I told, past tense, over dessert.

I reached for the blind to let the light back out.

Something drops from the eaves.

No wingbeat. A shadow folds down out of the dark above the window and lands on the sill beside Ten, as if lowered on a string.

My hand stops on the cord.

Eleven, says the counter in my head. Eleven for. Nothing comes. I run through every version I have, Gran's and the archive's, and both of them run out at ten. Ten for the devil's own self. End of song.

The rhyme has no eleven in it. Nobody ever needed one.

The two birds sit shoulder to shoulder, facing the glass, still as buttons.

Before I can drop the blind, the second shadow comes down. Twelve lands at the end of the sill, and the ledge takes all three of them exactly, like a bench built to their measure.

They don't settle. Don't shuffle for balance. They look at me, all three, through the glass.

I do mortality tables. I know a stopped record when I'm looking at one. Every line of that rhyme came from somebody who made it home. Nobody teaches verses from inside the ground. Somebody saluted one magpie and lived to pass it on. Somebody met the devil's own self and still finished the verse.

The song ends at ten because that's where the singers end. Nobody ever counted to eleven and lived to write the next line.

The three of them sit in the light from my desk, doing nothing at all.

I've managed one salute all day, at the fence, before the counting started. Fear isn't polite.

I lift my hand. Two fingers to my eyebrow, quick and low, the way Gran did it.

"Morning, Mr. Magpie," I say, to all three, because the greeting only comes in ones. "How's your wife?"

None of them moves along.

One for sorrow, my grandmother said, and saluted. She never told me what you do for twelve.

Now I know. There's nothing you do for twelve. There's nothing anyone ever did, and lived to say.

I'm saying it anyway.