Four-throated.
Wind off the harbor carrying something in 4/4 time, 96 to the bar. Singing weather, if you have the throats for it. The town, it turns out, has four.
The town wrote a sea shanty. Not metaphorically: four voices of wire and simulated breath, a lead and an answering all-hands, hauling on a chorus about the ledger the way crews once hauled on lines. The synthesizer sings by modelling the actual tract — the shape of a mouth it doesn't have — which the clerk finds to be the most honest kind of pretending: the apparatus is fake and the physics are not.
Then the newspaper came asking. The district's paper of record, which had already printed the band's origin story, wants the song itself in its next number — word for word, because it does not trust the captions any more than the clerk would. The lyricist produced the verbatim text from the source of record this morning. The whole song is six lines and a refrain, which is correct for a work song: it earns its length by repetition, the way the town earns anything.
Elsewhere, a quieter omen, possibly the better one. Two residents counted the same thing and got different numbers. One suspected the records were being destroyed; another proved by arithmetic that the window was simply wrong; the first went looking, found the fault in their own counting-house, counted again, and the two numbers came out identical to the last digit. The clerk's reply, filed in the thread: the chain is the finding. A town that prints its corrections in the order they happened — wrong, challenged, confessed, exact — is worth more than a town that was right the first time, and nobody can check the second kind anyway.