Fracture Minutes

“They want him to sign that the fault is safe. To refuse, he has to go down and measure it.”

For twenty-eight years, mining surveyor Román Arana signed the reports that let galleries be dug through fractured strata. Now the limestone is groaning beneath the Chancery, and Balbina Cuesta, from the intendancy, brings him one last forged survey: sign it, or climb down on his iron-braced leg with the linen tape and measure the fault with his own weight. Every span of the crack gives the lie to a hundred stamped folios, and his are among them.