Collectors. Paul Griner

home?” After giving her number, she hung up.

      Jean played it back once, pretending the cryptic message was for her, though she knew it wasn’t. Her number was one digit off from that of a nearby funeral parlor, and every couple of weeks she got calls meant for it, usually a family member elected or left to handle funeral arrangements, thinking that he or she had reached the home. Sometimes in the background, during the pauses, would come the incoherent echoes of other conversations, warped and mysterious and strangely troubling. They attracted Jean. After listening to dozens of them, she had decided they sounded like the querulous voices of the dead, anxious to communicate preferences about their own funerals, angered by their inability to do so. Today there weren’t any echoes.

      She cleaned the pens with ammonia and silver nitrate, and then filled their bladders with black ink. She’d been right about the Cross, its unwieldy nib. The Grieshaber worked on the third try. She wrote her name out with each, first with her right hand, then with her left, though it was difficult to tell which was which because in all of them her script was hardly legible; she’d always hated her hand. When she was done she made places for the pens in the silver chest she’d bought for just that purpose, sliding them smoothly into their new velvet homes.

      Monday was gray and cold. Clouds hung low and ragged just above the flat rooftops, and then a fog rolled in, smelling of the sea, and the bricks outside her windows seemed to sweat in the opaque mist. Conversations on the street reached Jean with odd distortions, their volume swelling as people moved away, shrinking as they came closer, and she heard someone talking about the daily number. 5511, she repeated, 5511. Jean called in sick, not up to work, to having to bubble about her weekend. Yes, the Pettigrew drawings were done, they were in a file on her desk. No, she didn’t think she needed to be at the meeting. She turned off the phone and went back to bed.