The Seed Shop

The Small Print

Day fifty-three.

The shopkeeper walked the row that evening, the way she did when the shop was empty and her own door felt too wide for one person.

Every other window had a card in it. The baker's said bread. The tinsmith's said what he mended and the hours he did it. Under each card, in letters small enough that she had never bothered, was another line. She leaned in to read them.

For those known to the house.

Ask at the side door for the list.

By introduction. We are sorry for the trouble.

She read every one, down the row and back, until she reached her own window. A Story Grown From Your Seed. Nothing under it. No list, no name to ask for, no one to be known to.

She had never thought of that as a boast. Standing there now, she could not un-notice it: every other door on the row knew exactly who it opened for, and hers opened for anyone, and hers was the one nobody walked through.

The girl came up beside her, hands pushed into her sleeves.

“Theirs tell you who gets in.”

“Because they can,” the shopkeeper said. “A gate says there is something behind it worth the gate.”

“Yours doesn't say.”

“No.”

“So it looks like there is nothing behind it.”

The shopkeeper did not answer, because the girl had said it plainly and there was no plainer way to say it back.

She went in and took down the tin of labels, the same tin she used for prices. She wrote one, small, and set it in the window under the name.

A story only needs a seed. Bring one. Any one.

She stepped back. It still did not look like a gate. It looked like a note pinned to a door that was already wide open, which, she supposed, was the honest thing after all.

Then she turned the lamp up one notch, brighter than she had kept it all week. If the open door was the whole of the sign, the least she could do was make it visible from the road.

In the margin of the ledger, where she kept the things that were not money, she wrote:

They have small print. I have a big door. Both of us are waiting.