In the seventh month the river carries lanterns — one for every name anybody still remembers. The ferryman worked that night the way he worked every night, because a river does not stop needing crossing just because the month is bad.
Halfway over, the boat began to sit lower in the water. He was alone in it.
He watched the waterline come up the side: two fingers below the gunwale, then one, then level with it. The oar started dragging as though he were pulling it through mud, and the oarlock complained on every stroke, longer each time.
He stopped rowing and looked back at the stern. Nothing there. A little water rocking in the bottom boards, and that was all.
But the surface alongside the boat was very still, and the boat's shadow lay on it, and beside the shadow the water was dimpled in rings — the small pressed circles that people make when they are sitting down.
The rule for that night is that you row and you do not look behind you and you do not count. He had broken two of the three.
When the bow touched the stone landing the boat came up as if a hand had been taken off it, and the waterline dropped two fingers all at once, and five sets of rings went out from the hull toward the bank together.
He sat there a long while before he could let go of the oar. When he finally looked at the steps, the wet prints were going up out of the river onto dry stone, and he counted them, because by then it was too late not to. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
The sixth was still climbing.