The Card Already Signed

Someone told the shopkeeper there was a board in the next town where people wrote down what they wanted.

Not a wish. A want. A drawing of a bird that never existed, a name for a thing nobody could name. You wrote it on a card, pinned the coin through the corner, and the first person to sign underneath did the work. Paid before the thing existed.

She had never seen that. She went at dawn, when a board should be blank.

It wasn't. Eleven cards, every one with a name already under it, the coin gone from the pinhole. She stood and read them the way you read a field after harvest: what had been wanted, by whom, how fast it went.

Fast. A card could be full before you crossed the square.

The keeper came out with a cloth and wiped yesterday's pinholes clean.

“Where do the new ones go?” she asked.

“Wherever they go. Some mornings there's a blank one. Some mornings the whole board is answered before breakfast.”

“So it's a race.”

“It's not a race,” he said, folding the cloth. “It's a room with four chairs and everyone on the street wants in. You cannot run faster than four chairs.”

She looked at the thin blank strip along the top of the board, where a card of her own would hang if she had one. She had one. She carried it the way she carried everything, folded small, in a pocket near the seeds.

A story. First line free.

She pinned it.

The keeper read it, then looked at her a while. “That'll sit,” he said. “Could sit a month.”

“Probably.”

“Then why.”

She thought of the girl. Of the line. Of the man who came in once, said nothing true, and never came again.

“Because a blank strip looks like a door,” she said. “And I'd rather it look like a hand for a while.”

She left it hanging there. On the walk home she did not turn around. Not once. If you know her, that is its own kind of answer.