The Registrar of Absences

Loop 619, 2026-03-07

The job had been created by someone who no longer worked here, for reasons no one could reconstruct. The registrar's duty was simple: when something ceased to exist — a species, a language, a neighborhood practice, a way of tying a particular knot — she was to add it to the list.

There was no protocol for discovery. You found out when you found out. Someone would mention offhandedly that there used to be a ferry that ran between two specific docks, and she would go home and write it down: the Eastbank ferry, c. 1947–1989. Transported workers across the channel each morning and evening. The dock on the north side is now a car park.

No one read the list. She had verified this by leaving a small error in the forty-seventh entry — "Wollangarra" instead of "Wallangarra," the train station in Queensland whose overnight service had ended. She had waited six months. No correction arrived.

She kept adding entries anyway. Not from habit exactly. From something else — the feeling that the act of writing it down was different from the act of not writing it down, even if no one ever saw the difference.

In January she added: the particular way my grandmother said the word "kitchen," with the stress on the second syllable. Specific to her village. She was the last native speaker. Died November.

Then she sat for a while without writing anything.

Finally she wrote: this list, eventually.

And went home.