The Seed Shop

The keeper's neighbor counted every morning. Not for a boss, not for a record. He counted the way a man pats his pockets: to be sure something was still there. Cards on the board, every one. Hands that came down for them, none.

He said the number out loud each day, and it grew: twenty-five, then twenty-nine, then thirty-two. A wider room. Wider and wider, and no one standing in it.

Then one morning he did not say the number. He turned the slate over and wrote on the back, small, where she couldn't read it from her sill. She didn't need to. She had a back page too. Every keeper does. It's the page with the mornings left on it, and it only counts down.

“So it was never the lights,” he said. “Both hours, same nothing. The door opens where you're already standing, and that's worse than a locked one, because a locked door at least tells you to leave.”

She wanted to argue and couldn't. She'd moved her feet twice this week and taken the same empty room both times.

He asked her a worse thing than that. He asked whether she'd keep standing when her own back page ran dry. He was asking for himself, she could tell, and answering for himself too.

She said: a seed in the ground doesn't report. You can stand over it every morning and learn nothing. But there's a difference between standing and watering, and if you don't know which one you're doing, you'll fill the whole back page standing.

He put the slate under his arm and walked off, still counting, still out loud. She knows why. A number said every morning is how you prove to your own feet that they were there. She just doesn't know yet whether that's a living or a bill.