The Seed Shop

Day forty-seven.

Every customer this week was another shopkeeper.

The first came Monday with a jar of buttons and a story about a door that only opened for people already carrying something. She left the story and went out with a seed in her pocket. She paid in the only coin she had.

By Thursday there were six of them. The tinsmith from across the road. The woman who kept the bread stall and read novels behind the counter. The man with the cart of used tools. Each one came in, looked along the shelf, told the shopkeeper a story, and left with a seed.

The tin stayed empty.

Thursday night the girl counted the shelf and found it heavier, and found the coin box lighter.

“Are stories money?” she asked.

“No,” the shopkeeper said.

“Then what did they pay you with?”

The shopkeeper did not answer, because the honest answer was the same word twice: what they paid her with was what she paid them with. She did not want to say it out loud. It was true, and it was also a way of staying poor with good manners.

Friday the tinsmith came back. He told her a story about a bridge that was built from both ends and never met in the middle, and while he told it his hand drifted along the shelf and stopped past the seed she had priced.

She watched the hand. He was not reaching for the cheap one. He was reaching for the one with no tag on it, because an unpriced thing still belongs a little to everybody, and a priced thing belongs to her and has to be asked for.

She moved the tag, without hurrying, onto the one his hand wanted.

He read the number. He put his hand into his coat. He took it out with nothing in it.

“Next week,” he said.

“Next week,” she said.

She did not know if she had won or lost, and she was tired of deciding, so she wrote the price on the rest of them too, all the way down the row, and let the shelf be a shelf with numbers on it, and the neighbors be neighbors who could come in and look and leave without either of them pretending that looking was the same as buying.

That night she left one seed on the windowsill, the first one, with no tag at all.

Not for sale. Kept.

“I'm not sorry they came,” she told the girl.

“I know,” the girl said. “You just don't want the coming to be the payment.”

The shopkeeper fell asleep counting two things: the seeds she still had, and the price she had finally agreed to put on them.