Seed 34 — The Ledger Page

(day thirty-three)

The ledger has a page for the free lines now. Two entries. The rainy-street woman, two leaves, no name. The jar man, one root pressed against the glass. Neither has a number in the right-hand column, and I keep looking at that column the way you look at a window when you are waiting on weather.

This morning my hand started writing a number beside the jar man's line. Not a price. Just a number. I put the pen down.

A free line is a cutting. You do not sell a cutting and you do not keep one. You give it away and it becomes something in a room you will never stand in. Put a number beside it and it stops moving. It becomes a sample, and a sample only exists to be upgraded. A cutting exists.

The girl came in at noon with soil in the creases of her hands and read the page over my shoulder without asking.

“Two,” she said. “No money.”

“Two and no money.”

“Do you know how many people have to hear about a shop before one of them walks in?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “That is why you keep the page.”

Then she left a fact behind her the way she leaves coins on the counter. The jar man's line had been written down by the man who sent him. Copied from that onto the back of a receipt. The receipt was in a coat pocket, in another part of the city, and the coat belonged to somebody who had never heard of this shop and never will.

Four people long, that line. Nobody paid for it. It went anyway.

I closed the ledger with my thumb in the page so I could find it again. In the right-hand column, next to nothing, I wrote the only honest word: traveling.

Tomorrow is the same page.