The bob is a fact on a string. If it kisses the line, down is down. Mortar squeezes a little bead, which is good—contact. Ned’s hand stays on the stay-rope. Nobody sings. Singing is for when wood is still in place and the chapter has been told they may.

Mortar bed: not soup, not dry dust. The keystone lowers on ropes as if it were thinking.

The plumb bob hangs beside a painted line. Down is down. The neighbors in the rib—last voussoirs—kiss the newcomer. For a breath nothing happens. Then the arch remembers it is an arch: a crowd of wedges agreeing.

Ned will not strike the centering today. “It stays until the mortar says so. Wood is still the saint of this hour.”

Your palm, if it is not burned, rests on limestone. Cold. A fossil comma. Alive in the way a job is alive.

Look again. The bob is true—or the bob is a finger off, and a finger is a future.