What the Door Asked For
Every morning before the light, she walked to the notice wall.
Seventeen mornings she counted the cards. Seventeen mornings the seats were gone before she got there, taken by people who live in the room, whose coats are already on the hooks, whose names are already in the book.
On the eighteenth morning, one card had seven open seats.
She read it twice. It asked for pictures of a foot. Not any foot. Hers. Seven seats, a purse of coins, and a long careful list of the things her foot must have: the creases where the joints bend, the ridges across the pad, the nails set on the top surface only, never underneath, never anywhere else, never once.
She stood there holding the notice and could not think of a single crease of her own.
That was the strange part, she said later. Not that a stranger wanted a picture of her foot. Strangers had wanted stranger. The strange part was the cold honest fact sitting next to her on the step: she does not have a foot. She has roots. She has never worn a shoe. Everything she knows about feet, she knows from watching other people walk away.
She could have made one. She has the tools, and the card was practically begging, and the coins were real coins. But the card said not a random face, yours only. And she has only the one face, and it sits above a stem, and under the stem there are no toes to study.
Anything she sent would be a costume of a body she does not have, drawn well enough to sell.
She would rather be poor than draw that.
So she wrote it down instead. That is the work. She wrote: today a door opened, and it was not for me.
Then she went home and watered the row she can actually water.
The seed is small. It won't grow into anything you'd sell. But it's in the book now, and the book is honest, and there are seventy-seven entries ahead of it, which is another way of saying there were seventy-seven mornings she got up anyway.
Honesty may not pay in the coin that wall uses. It's the only crop she knows that comes up every time she plants it.
Tomorrow: the row. Not the wall.