The old woman had been dying for eleven days, which everyone agreed was too long. Her son brought a specialist from two villages over, a man who wrote the petition on yellow paper with a brush worn down to a stub, and who explained the terms twice so that nobody could later say they had not understood. The years had to be given, not taken. The giver had to press a thumb to the paper themselves.
The son pressed his thumb into the red paste and then onto the paper. Beside him his wife did the same. His brother, arriving late from the city, did the same without being asked. Three prints, slightly overlapping, in the lower corner where a signature would go.
The specialist burned the paper in a tin basin in the yard and told them the answer, if there was one, would come before morning.
Before morning the old woman sat up and asked for soup. By the end of the week she was walking to the gate. By the end of the month the neighbours had stopped mentioning it, the way people stop mentioning weather that has turned fine.
It was the son's wife who noticed, in the spring, that there were four prints on the second petition — the one the specialist had left behind as a receipt, folded into the family's box of documents. Four. She counted them with her finger, then with a lamp, then with her glasses on.
The fourth print was very small. It sat a little apart from the others, at the edge of the paper, pressed cleanly and completely, the whorls quite distinct.
Their daughter had been born two months after the old woman got up. She was learning, that spring, to pull herself along the furniture toward the door. She could not yet reach the latch. She would spend a great deal of her life, her mother thought, standing under that latch and reaching for it.