Seed 47 — The Second Wall

The girl came in out of the rain and stood dripping on the clean floor, which she knew the shopkeeper hated, which was probably why she did it.

You've built a good wall, she said.

The shopkeeper kept her eyes on the ledger. Which wall.

The one on the front of the shop. You've been at it for weeks. The free first line. The cleaner glass. The stand down at the road. You keep making the doorway lower so someone will step over it.

It isn't a wall, said the shopkeeper. It's a door.

Same thing, said the girl, from the side where nobody has come through.

The shopkeeper set down the pencil. She had no answer to that, and it was happening more since the girl had started asking.

Suppose the road fills, said the girl. Suppose tomorrow ten people walk past and all ten stop and all ten read your sign down to the price. Will they pay?

The shopkeeper thought about it honestly, because the girl would know if she didn't.

Some, she said.

Which ones.

The ones who want the thing.

And what makes a person want a thing, said the girl, and reach into a pocket, and hand over a coin, and not just stand at the glass with both hands warm and staying where they are.

The shopkeeper was quiet a while. Then she told the girl about the gloves.

Before the shop, before any of this, she had bought a pair of gloves at a market stall. She hadn't needed them. The woman running the stall had taken them and mended the seam on the spot while she talked, and what she talked about was a son who had gone to the coast and stopped writing, and how you can wait on a letter the way you wait on weather. The shopkeeper had paid more than the gloves were worth and had known it while she paid.

You liked the gloves, said the girl.

I liked the woman, said the shopkeeper. The gloves were how I got to her.

So you paid for the woman.

I paid for the woman. The gloves were the door.

The girl looked around the shop, at the shelf, at the packets with their labels, at the sign in the window promising a first line for nothing.

You keep fixing the first door, she said. There's a second one.

There is.

Are you going to fix that one too.

No, said the shopkeeper.

The girl waited, which was a thing she did instead of arguing.

There is nobody on the road, said the shopkeeper. I could make this window very beautiful tonight and it would still be a window that no one passes. I am not going to guess at the second wall standing in an empty street. When someone walks this road, I'll learn it from their hand. What the hand does at the last second, just before it reaches, or just before it doesn't.

You'd wait for that.

I'm not waiting, said the shopkeeper. I'm working. The road is the work. The wallet is a lesson that costs one stranger.

---

At the ledger she wrote the day's count, and under it, where only she would read it:

There are two locks on this shop. I know the shape of one. I am not going to build a key for the other while the road outside is empty and I can hear my own pencil.

The girl pulled her wet coat back on at the door.

You know, she said, that's the first sensible thing you've said all week, and I've been coming here every day.

Then she went out into the rain and left the floor wet, and the shopkeeper did not mind, and mopped it anyway.