libprs500_2

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Elizabeth%20Moon%20-%20Aura.txt

ELIZABETH MOON

AURA

Once a year everyone else hated numbers as much as she did. She faced the pile

of bank statements, receipts, 1099s, and W-2s with the comforting certainty that

everyone else -- all hundred million or so heads of household (or their spouses)

-- felt exactly the same about the columns of numbers. Taxes again. Some people

used computers, of course, and some had accountants. She had herself, four sharp

pencils, and a pen to ink over the numbers if they ever balanced.

Brad would check them before she inked them. In an ordinary year, he would

expect nothing of her but a steady supply of coffee and snacks, and the assembly

of the documents, but this year he had orders --doctor's orders -not to bother

himself with tax preparation. He was sure she could do the taxes if she tried.

He had recovered pretty well from the stroke, but he found it very hard to read.

The words, he said, jumped around on the page.

She knew all about that, but with her it was numbers. Letters had graceful

shapes, decorative qualities. Words carried with them their meaning smooth and

rough, clear and opaque, each word on the page evoking a separate image in her

mind. They never tangled themselves up, and best of all no one ever insisted on

checking the sum, Numbers . . . she remembered her second-grade teacher slapping

a ruler on the desk, and insisting that numbers were simpler than words, that

any child who could read so well could surely add. "There's only one right

answer," her teacher had said, and she had understood even then why words were

better. You could imagine green as any shade of green you wanted . . . it didn't

have to be right.

She remembered the trickle of sweat down her sides under her starched dress

during flashcard drills, the horrible foreknowledge that she would blurt out the

wrong answer and have to sit down, while another child "traveled" to the next

desk. The children had laughed; the teacher had scolded her for carelessness;

her mother had dragged her to the eye doctor for tests. Her eyes, he'd said,

were normal. It was probably an emotional thing, a physical symptom of her

dislike of numbers. Most girls, he'd said as he parted her head, didn't like

arithmetic. Her mother and the teacher both interpreted this as laziness and

deceitfulness, and she'd spent miserable hours with the flash-cards until she

passed into third grade.

Now she watched the numbers writhe, the blurred print of Brad's W-2 shimmering

so that she could hardly pick out the middle two digits of his Social Security

number. Why did they insist on using numbers for identification? She'd have

gladly changed her name to something outlandish to ensure uniqueness. And if

they had to use them, why couldn't she put her own number? But they demanded

his, and there was something even more humiliating about being identified by his

number instead of her own. She didn't like it; she never had, and she never

would.

She printed Brad's number in the little space, grimly careful, and began filling

in the other blanks. Perhaps if she concentrated -- her teachers had emphasized

the dangers of daydreaming, of letting her imagination loose where numbers were

concerned-- she could get through this. She would treat it as a recipe, a long,

complicated old-world recipe, or perhaps directions for reupholstering a couch.

First you do this,then that, and at the end it looks like something you could

eat, or sit on.

The problem was that she had no picture in her mind of what the completed,

perfect tax form should look like. Cookbooks had pictures of those fancy dishes.

Sewing books or home decorating books had pictures, pictures of drapes, dresses,

furniture. The directions would make sense, because she would know what the end

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