No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel

stranger wrote these things down for us, her fingers red and her boots soaked through. After praying, everyone went home and wrapped our hands around warm cups of tea, dried our socks by the fire. We had figured a day or two of this weather, a week, two weeks. But on it went.
    At night, the stranger came to my window. The hugeness of what was happening was impossible to express, so we worked in a smaller currency. We traded tiny, observed facts. “The chipmunks look like they are enjoying life,” she said.
    “Sometimes, when the water begins to boil, I put my face into the steam until it starts to hurt.”
    “Some of us are happier than others.”
    “I like it when I can feel myself falling asleep.”
    “The days are getting shorter and shorter.”
    “I am afraid of not being myself anymore. I feel like I’m disappearing or something.”
    “Yes,” she said. “I know what you mean.”
    The jeweler’s cheeks
were sallow with worry. He had stopped sleeping, and ate only what the stranger left on the plates he brought to her. He was angry with her for being so obedient. If only she had insisted, told the villagers that she would sit during the day but come home—home to his house—at night. After a lifetime of waiting, a companion had appeared out of the heavens for him, dropped down like a gift from God, and been taken away by the petty selfishness of other people.
    Most villagers were not aware of his discontent. We were busy worrying about the rain and our own morning-till-nights. Our houses were full of hanging clothes, which left puddles underneath themselves. When we wanted to leave our houses to walk to the shops or work, we made our way along the line of garments, feeling each one, looking for the driest, but nothing was dry. We smelled like drenched sheep all the time, our necks itchy under wet scarves.
    Some people began to notice that our stranger was not writing as vigorously as she had been. The jeweler peeked over her shoulder and discovered a soggy list:
     
    Money
    Love
    Health (mother, father, children, spouse, self, others)
    Sex
    A Son
    Winning the bet
    Next to each of these was a series of notches, one for each time one of us asked for the thing. Money had two rows of lines. We prayed for the health of ourselves more often than the health of our spouses but less often than the health of our parents. Sex was less requested, probably because we were shy, but almost all of us wanted to win the bet. The final category, the one that made us feel terrible, was this: A prayer that what happened to the stranger does not happen to me. Even with the safety of Creation between us and that story, many of us, dozens, had sat down on that old wooden chair and wished out loud that our stranger’s stolen life, her lost children, her mutilated mother remain only hers. That she alone sit out in the falling sky and record our hopeful lives for us.
    The jeweler told us what he had seen. He made the rounds from house to house to say that we were leaving our stranger outside in bad weather under a cowskin and telling her how grateful we were to be better off than she was. He told everyone he insisted she sleep in the house from now on. “Also, peace is not even on the list,” he said. “Not one of us has prayed for peace.”
    “Yes, but it’s only temporary. We’re building her a palace. We’re praying for peace when we pray for all the other things. We want money because we want peace, right?” the banker tried nervously to reason, while he popped a nut out of its shell and licked the crystals of salt from his fingers. The banker was leaning against his doorframe, each polished button on his vest reflecting the jeweler’s face back at him, distorted and clownish.
    “I think we could stand to pray for what we really want, then. But in the meantime, we haven’t built the palace yet and our stranger is freezing.”
    “Many nights we invite her into our homes and rub her feet. Has she forgotten?” The banker