Blue Glove

Ten minutes, two thousand points, which comes to fifty cents. She knows because she did the sum once and decided not to do it again. Right index finger on the g, right middle on the h, and hold. A hand comes up on the screen in a blue glove, turned on its side, with a number between its two fingers, one or two, and the number is the boss. The glove, it says somewhere, is so you can't tell whose hand it is. Nobody's, then. A hand from nowhere lifts its middle finger while the screen says one, and her own middle finger wants to go, just a little, for about as long as it takes a cup to decide to fall, and she holds it, and lifts the other, and it's correct, and it's slow. Over and over. Then a thank-you page, and the kettle. Somewhere in Germany that hesitation goes into a column next to four thousand others, from twenty-two countries, each in its own language, and comes out the same everywhere, a small tax on being near a hand. That evening her sister rings, the one who stayed up north, and they talk for an hour about nothing: the boiler, the boy's new job, whether Dad would have liked the new priest. Somewhere in the second half she hears her own vowels going flat and long, going home, and she lets them, the way you let a current take the boat a bit when you know the river. Halfway through a sentence her sister stops and laughs and says, you sound like Mum. And she does. She hadn't meant to. Nobody in a glove has ever made her do that. It took someone whose hand she'd know in the dark, and an hour, and the line crackling, and a thing she could have held still against, and didn't.