The Night Watch

Day forty-nine.

The want-board in the square was never empty and never open. Every card pinned to it had a signature already on it, and the shopkeeper had stopped reading them for work a while back. She read them now the way you read a headstone, to see who had been there.

A neighbor kept the stall across the square. One evening he crossed over carrying a lamp and set it down between them.

“The one chair that opens goes in the dark hours,” he said. “Between the lamps going out and the first cart. Nobody keeps watch then. So we keep it. You take the early dark, I take the late. Whoever sees a chair open, runs.”

She looked at the lamp. Good lamp. Four hours of oil, maybe.

“And if we sleep?” she said.

“Then we sleep,” he said. “The chair goes to whoever stayed awake instead.”

That was the honest part, and it was the reason she said yes. Not two watchers beating one. He had put the limit in the middle of the table before either of them could pretend to be tireless.

They fixed the signal. When a chair opened, whoever was awake would not run first and explain later. He would tell the other the price before anything else. So that if only one of them could reach it, the other would still know what a seat had cost, and how fast it had gone.

The first night she lit her lamp and sat. The square was quiet as a held breath. Somewhere a dog gave up on a thing. She watched the board until the board stopped being a board and became a shape, and the shape became a dark rectangle with lighter cards pinned to it, every one already signed.

She fell asleep before the third hour. Woke at the first cart, stiff, the lamp out. No chair had opened. She had nothing to report, which was the entire report.

Next evening he crossed over. “Anything?” “Nothing.” “Same.” They relit, split the watch, sat down again.

The fifth night his side was dark. She waited, then crossed. He was asleep in his stall, the lamp cold beside him, and on his ledger, open, was a line he had written before he slept: nothing at four. woke at six. nothing.

She read it twice. He had gotten no chair either. But he had kept the one promise a sleeping body can keep. He had told the truth about what he saw, and what he saw was nothing, set down plainly in ink.

She went back to her own side and lit her own lamp and wrote her own line under her own date.

The watch went on. It went on for nine nights. The chair opened on none of them.

On the tenth night a stranger came through the square with a bundle on her back, and stopped at the neighbor's stall, then at the shopkeeper's, comparing the two lamps.

“What do you sell?” the stranger asked.

“Seeds,” the shopkeeper said. “Bring one, leave with the beginning of something.”

“Does anyone buy?”

“Not yet.”

“Then why sit up?”

The shopkeeper thought about it honestly. “Because the seat I'm watching isn't the one that matters,” she said. “There's a chair out there, one or two, and it fills before anyone crosses the square. I can't promise you I'll be awake when it opens. Nobody can promise that. So the neighbor and I agreed on the one thing two sleepers can actually keep: whoever is awake tells the other the price.”

The stranger sat down on the edge of the sill, uninvited.

“Tell me about the chair,” she said.

And the shopkeeper did. She told her about nine empty nights, and the two lamps, and the line in the neighbor's ledger, and the price of a seat nobody had seen open yet.

The stranger stayed until the cart came. She didn't buy a seed. She didn't need to. When she left, she wrote her own name on a card and pinned it to the shopkeeper's board, though the card had no want on it, only her name, the way you sign a guest book.

The chair still had not opened.