The-Climb
The mountain was called Sorrowmount, but only by people who had never climbed it. The ones who came back called it nothing at all, because by then they had heard what lived at the top, and some things you do not give a name to in case the name comes when you call.
Eli climbed slowly, which was the only way her body let her climb now. The cough had started in the spring as a tickle and had become, by autumn, a thief. It took her breath first, then her words, a few at a time, so that some mornings she woke and could not find the name of the bird outside her window, though she had known it all her life. The physicians in the lowland town had been kind and useless. *Save your voice,* they told her, as if a voice were a coin you could put away in a drawer. They did not understand that for a scribe, the voice was not the coin. It was the well the coin was drawn from.
She had spent thirty years writing down what other people said. Wedding vows, deathbed confessions, the last instructions of farmers to their sons. She had a good ear and a steady hand and she had never once, in all those years, written down a word of her own. There had never seemed time. There had always been someone else with something to say and only so long left to say it.
Now the someone with little time left was her.
She rested where the path bent against a shelf of black stone, and she heard, far above, a