The Eleven O'Clock Round

Most lamplighters never hear the lamps. That is the point of the binding. Sefa heard hers on a wet October night, and at first she thought it was the wind in a drainpipe. It said, very clearly, "You missed the one on Cooper Lane." She had not missed the one on Cooper Lane. She had a list and she crossed things off the list and Cooper Lane was crossed off. But she went back anyway, because a voice with no mouth is a hard thing to argue with, and she found the Cooper Lane lamp dark and cold and the glass faintly fogged from the inside, the way a window fogs when something is breathing against it. Sefa had lit lamps for nine years. She knew the names of every spirit on her round, the way a postman knows the dogs. She did not know this. She put her hand against the iron post and felt it shudder, once, like a person trying not to cry in public. "Right," she said, to nobody, to the street. "Right. Okay."