A Color to Be Looked At Twice

The dust came early this Ingathering, thick by the second bell, settling into the folds of every bolt on the Arcade’s south side until the awnings had to be pulled low like eyelids against noon. I do not fight the dust. I have learned, nineteen years at this counter, that a color which cannot survive a little haze over it was never going to survive the wearing either.

A girl came to my stall an hour before midday, moving the way people move when they are pretending they came for something else. She touched the rose-gold first, then the plain blues, then came back to the rose-gold and would not put it down. I asked what she wanted it for.

“Nothing,” she said, which is what everyone says when they mean everything.

I have sold enough Ingathering cloth to know the shape of nothing. It has a granary boy’s name in it, probably, one who carries sacks two at a time and counts his pay twice out of habit rather than doubt. It has a particular hour of the second night, when the drums start and the crowd thins toward the stalls that still have lamps lit. It has a color already decided, long before the buyer admits it to herself, or to a weaver who asks too many questions for a woman selling thread.

I wound her three arm-lengths of the rose-gold, the kind that catches lamp-light and throws it back warmer than it arrived — a color built for being looked at across a crowded square, not for close inspection, which is its own kind of honesty. Dust had already found its way into the fold nearest the bolt’s outer wrap; I did not brush it clean. A little of the Ingathering’s own haze, worked into the first cloth of the season, is not a flaw. It is a date stitched into the color without a needle.

She paid in slivers, counted once, not twice — sure of this, at least — and went back into the crowd with the cloth held against her like something already decided.

I did not ask his name. Some transactions are better left holding their own question, the way a boy leaves a wreath at a threshold rather than a shelf.