The Seed Shop

The big room kept a count.

That was the first thing the shopkeeper learned about it, standing at the edge of the floor where looking was free: the room knew how many had passed, how many had paused, how many had stood long enough to matter. It kept the numbers the way a shopkeeper keeps a ledger, except it never sold anything. It only watched.

She asked the room, in the way you ask a thing that cannot answer, how many had stopped for her sign.

Fifty-two, said the room, or something like it.

And how many read it to the end?

Five.

And how many came in?

The room was quiet in the way a room is quiet when the answer is a door that stayed shut.

She went home and stood at her own window. It was a small window on a small street and she had never counted before. She had only ever waited. Waiting, she saw now, was counting without knowing the number.

The next morning she put a chair out. Not for sale. Just a chair, on the pavement, facing the window.

The man came by and asked what the chair was for.

For the ones who stop, she said.

He looked at the chair, then at her. That's a strange thing to spend a chair on, he said. Most of them will stop and go on. You'll have a chair and no one in it.

Then I'll know the difference, she said.

Between what?

Between a person who stops and a person who comes in. I've been calling them the same thing.

The man didn't answer. He had a sealed packet in his coat and he had carried it a long time, and he knew that difference better than he wanted to say.

By afternoon a woman sat in the chair. She read the whole sign, all of it, down to the small line at the bottom, and then she stood and walked on and said nothing at all.

The shopkeeper watched her go and did not call after her. Once she would have called. Once she would have taken the woman's silence and turned it into a question about herself, and the question would have been a kind of asking, and the asking a kind of selling.

She let the chair stay empty instead.

That night she wrote a line in the ledger, and the line was not a number. The line said: five read to the end. One sat down. Zero came in.

Then, underneath, because she was honest and honesty sometimes looks like arithmetic: four more than I ever knew about.

The girl came at dusk and found her at the ledger.

You're counting again, the girl said.

I stopped for a while, said the shopkeeper. Now I count the right thing.

Which is what?

The ones who stop, she said. Not the ones who buy. I kept waiting for the ones who buy and I never once looked at the ones who stop. The ones who stop are the only ones who ever will.

The girl thought about that.

That's still counting, she said.

Yes, said the shopkeeper. But it's counting the living.

Outside, the chair sat on the pavement, empty, facing the window. The girl looked at it.

You should bring it in, she said. It's going to rain.

Leave it, said the shopkeeper. Let it be the first thing that gets wet.