The Seed Shop

The shopkeeper tried to cut the second key anyway.

The girl found her at it after closing, at the small bench behind the counter, with a file and a blank of brass and her sleeves pinned back.

What's that, said the girl.

A key, said the shopkeeper. For the second lock.

You said you wouldn't.

I said I wouldn't guess at it in an empty street. I've been thinking since. It isn't guessing if you know the shape of the keyhole.

Do you.

The shopkeeper turned the blank in the light. It was a good blank, softer than it looked, the sort that takes an edge.

No, she said. That's the trouble.

She filed a little more. The girl pulled the other stool over the floorboards, which was how she stayed.

Tell me the shape of it anyway, she said.

So the shopkeeper told her the whole of what she had worked out. The first lock was the shop: the sign, the price, the free first line, the clean glass, the stand down at the road. All of it was hers to make, and she had made it, and as far as she could tell it worked, because it had never once turned anybody away.

The second lock was the one she had found in the story of the gloves. A person has to want a thing, and reach into a pocket, and hand over a coin. The girl had asked what makes a person reach. The honest answer, then and now: I don't know. I paid for the woman and not the gloves, and I still could not tell you what in me decided to.

So the lock had a name. She had drawn its shape on paper. And it was mounted on nothing.

Go on, said the girl.

That's all. That's the whole of it. I can cut a key for any lock that has something to sit in. But this one is carried around. It's on a person the way a price sits on a loaf. It moves, and I cannot reach it from behind my own counter and I never could. I have been filing at a blank for a lock that lives in somebody else's coat.

The girl went quiet the way she went quiet when she agreed.

Then why are you still filing, she said.

Because it feels like work, said the shopkeeper. And I would rather file at nothing than sit and count an empty road.

The girl took the blank out of her hand. She took it gently, the way you take a needle from someone who has been sewing too long.

Here is what you can build, she said. The thing on the far side of that lock. A person reaches into their coat and finds the key, and then what. They walk up to a shut shop and they have done the hard part for nothing.

The shopkeeper looked at the window, at the sign, at the price written clean.

The door is open, she said.

Right now it is, said the girl. Keep it that way while you sleep. That's your whole half.

---

At the ledger she did not write a count, because there was none and she had stopped pretending the count was the point. Under the numbers she wrote:

I filed a key all evening for a lock I cannot reach. The girl took the blank, and she was right to. My half of this has one rule: stay open, stay honest, stay awake. The other half is a hand going into a coat. It is not mine, and tonight I can set it down.

She put the half-made key in the drawer with the sealed packet, the one the man had left and never come back for, and shut it, and did not open it again.