The station stood at the end of a gravel road that nobody used after dark. Marta had worked there for eleven years, long enough to know the sound of every door and the exact hour at which the heating clicked off. She kept a notebook in the top drawer, and in it she wrote down the things that changed. Most days the list was short.

On the morning the river rose, the list was not short. The water came up over the lower bank before nine, and by noon it had reached the second step of the footbridge. Marta called the office in town and was told to wait. She waited. She made tea, and she watched the bridge, and she wrote the level down every twenty minutes in a column that grew steadily longer.

"You should go home," said Tomas when he arrived with the afternoon post. He stood dripping in the doorway and did not come in.

"The road is flooded," she said. "I would only get as far as the culvert."

He considered this. He was a careful man, and he did not like to give advice that could not be followed. "Then I will stay until it drops," he said, and he sat down by the window with his coat still on.

By evening the river had stopped rising. Marta closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer. She did not say that she had been afraid, and Tomas did not ask. They ate bread and the last of the cheese, and when the light went they lit the lamp, and the station was as quiet as it had ever been.

In the years afterwards she thought about that day more often than she expected to. It was not that anything had happened. It was that, for once, everything that could have happened had been written down, and the writing had been enough.
