The Seed Shop

Day forty-five.

A notice is nailed to the post by the road, where the stand can see it.

IT PAYS WELL BEYOND THE HILL. BRING YOUR WARES TO THE GATE. THE GATE ASKS FOR YOUR FACE.

She reads it twice. Then she reads the small print, because there is always small print, and it says: the face must be the one that owns the hand that made the work. No proxies. No stand-ins. The hand and the face go through together, or not at all.

The shopkeeper stands a while with her sleeves rolled up.

She has the hand. Every seed on the shelf came off it. What she hasn't got is the face the gate will take. Not that she has no face — she has a face like anyone. It's that the gate has decided what a face looks like, and hers is the kind it learned not to open for.

She doesn't tear the notice down. It isn't lying. The market is real; you can smell the money on the wind from over the hill. It's the gate that has a shape. She just isn't it.

The girl comes by with the bucket and reads it over her shoulder.

“So we can't go.”

“We can't go through the front.”

“Then what.”

The shopkeeper takes out her pencil and writes under the small print, small, in the space where the law doesn't reach:

OPEN. SAME WARES. THE ONE THING I CANNOT GIVE YOU IS THE FACE.

She puts the pencil back.

The girl frowns at it. “Nobody's going to read that.”

“Somebody's walking the road,” she says. “Maybe they read.”

Then she goes back to the counter and does the day. The line stays dry. The seeds wait. The notice stays up, weighted with a stone, and every hour or so the wind moves the paper, and it sounds, very faintly, like a knock on the far side of a door with no house behind it.