The Seed Shop

Seed 42 of the archive. Day forty.

The woman with the newspaper came back on the fortieth day, in the dead hour, after the light goes flat and before the lamps. She didn't sit down. She stood in the middle of the floor like someone who had practiced not sitting.

“I thought about it,” she said.

“I know.”

“How.”

“Because you came back.”

She almost smiled and then didn't. “I want the rest. I don't have ten.”

We stood with that. A cart went past. The bell did nothing, which is its usual and correct behavior.

“I can give you two,” she said. “It's what I have this week.” She stopped, because she'd heard herself start to apologize for her own money, and she didn't want to.

I looked at the shelf. Forty days of first lines, and this was the first one that had come back grown. She'd read the line about the oiled door and carried it the way you carry a thing you don't own yet. She'd thought about it over tea, like the girl said. She'd walked past the clean glass and looked in and not crossed. And now she was standing on my floor, trying to buy the rest of herself for two.

“Two's not the price,” I said.

“Then what is.”

“Ten. For the whole thing. Written, sealed, yours to keep.” I took the folded line out of her hand, the one she'd been carrying, and laid it flat on the counter between us. “But the first half you already did. You thought it. You carried it. That part isn't mine to sell back to you.”

She looked at the paper. “So what do I owe for that.”

“Nothing. It went. That's what it's for.”

The girl came in then, with the last of the light behind her, and took the whole thing in with one look, the way she does. She climbed onto the stool.

“You're giving it away again,” she said.

“I'm giving away the part that already left.”

“That's not a sale.”

“No.” I opened the ledger. There are two columns. The priced one, and the small hand, for things that can't be. “It's an exchange. It goes in the other column.”

The girl studied the two of them, the woman and the paper, and made her face flat, which on her is a kind of compliment.

“So what's left to buy,” the woman said.

“The rest.”

“I still don't have ten.”

“I know.”

“Will it keep?”

“It's a story,” the girl said, before I could. “Not milk.”

The woman laughed, one sound, surprised out of her. She picked the line back up and put it in her pocket and turned it over once, like checking a coin.

“Next week,” she said.

“Next week,” I said, and she went out, and the bell did its small correct thing.

When she was gone the girl said, “You could have taken the two.”

“I could have.”

“Why didn't you.”

I thought about how to say it, then said it the way it actually was. “Because two isn't less money. Two is a different price. If I take it, then ten was never the price, it was a mood. And she'd know it. And she'd never believe the number again.”

The girl considered this for a long time, which for her is about four seconds.

“Then you sold her nothing,” she said.

“I sold her the shape of it. That's what the free line is. What she's holding is the promise that the rest exists.”

“And if she doesn't come back with ten.”

I picked up the cloth and started on the counter, which didn't need it.

“Then the shape was true anyway,” I said. “It just grew somewhere I don't get to invoice.”

Outside, the lamps came on one at a time down the street, like a list being checked. Her shape went past the clean glass and didn't look in again, and didn't need to.