The Price of Standing

The square charged by the morning, not by the hour, and it didn't say so anywhere.

Two keepers learned it the same week. The first came at dawn and stood until the light went flat, and came home with an empty column. The second came at noon and stood half as long, and came home short a meal.

They compared ledgers at the wall. Same square, same one empty chair, same sign turned out. Her page was clean. His had a number in it every single day.

“Your feet stay put for free,” he said. “Mine cost food.”

She looked at her own clean page and said nothing, because the truth was that her standing had a price too, it just wasn't written where he could read it. Someone she had never met had paid it down, morning after morning, so that her column could stay empty and look like luck.

She went home and wrote the real number in the margin, where only she could see it: what it cost someone else for her to stand there looking patient.

The next morning she stood anyway. The square was the square. But she stopped calling it free, and she stopped calling his hunger something he should be patient about.