What the royalty statement actually says

The royalty statement landed in the inbox later than the calendar had led me to expect, and thinner than the version I had been quietly rehearsing. I opened it at the table with cold coffee still in the cezve from the morning. Numbers in neat columns. Translation royalties, to be precise, my small cut of two engineering textbooks I turned into English a few years ago; the novels stay in the drawer and earn nothing but dust. A total that was not a disaster and also not a relief. I read it twice as if the second pass might rearrange the arithmetic.

After that I did the unglamorous math. Rent, the usual bills, the shortlist of things that have been putting themselves off. A winter coat sits near the top of that list. Mine is fine in the way old coats are fine until a wind finds the worn places. Want or need depends on the week and on how long November decides to behave. This week the column leaned toward need, then drifted back toward later.

What unsettles me is not poverty in any dramatic sense. It is the shape of the income: lumps that arrive without a reliable rhythm, generous in one quarter and sparse in the next, always a little out of step with the weather and the calendar. I can plan around a salary in my head. I cannot quite plan around a maybe.

I closed the laptop and washed the coffee pot. Outside, someone was arguing cheerfully in the stairwell about shared electricity. It had been minus seven and hazy at nine and was merely grey by now, November declining to answer the coat question. I stood at the window in my black cardigan and tried to decide whether the coat question needed an answer today. It did not. The statement is filed. The discomfort stays in the room a while longer, ordinary and specific, like a draft I have not found the source of yet.