The Seed Shop

A man came down the street with a bucket and a squeegee, washing shop windows for a coin apiece. The baker paid him. The laundrette paid him. He stopped in front of the shop and looked at the glass a long time without lifting the squeegee.

“It's fine,” the shopkeeper said.

“It's fine from in there,” he said.

So she walked out and stood on the street and looked back in. The glass was a grey film with her own shape in it, and behind her shape the shop was a guess.

She gave him the coin.

He worked the squeegee in long pulls, top to bottom. The water came off grey, then black, then clear. When he finished, the street came in all at once, like the room had been holding its breath and let it out.

The woman with the newspaper was on the bench across the road, her paper open. She looked up. Through the clean glass she saw the counter, the shelf, the small line under the sign. She read it the way you read a word you have been walking past for a week.

She didn't cross. She folded the paper and went on down the street. But she had seen in.

The girl came at closing. She stood in the doorway, looked at the glass, then at the shopkeeper.

“You kept it smudged,” she said.

“I didn't know it was smudged.”

“That's how smudge works.” She tapped the glass with one knuckle. It rang clean. “Now they can see you're open.”

“And still empty,” the shopkeeper said.

“Those are two different things,” the girl said. “One of them's a shop. The other one's a day.”

The shopkeeper opened the ledger and wrote in the small hand she kept for things that couldn't be priced: clean glass. cost: one coin, and the smudge.