From the Editor’s Desk

I got to a farmers market at half past five one morning by accident, having dropped somebody at the airport, and I learned that a market before it opens is not a smaller version of the market. It is a different one. Nobody would sell me anything. The bread woman tore the heel off a loaf and handed it to me and waved my money away, not out of kindness, but because we were not open, and money was not what was in use yet. What was in use was the coffee cart passing cups down the row without asking who wanted one. The flower man setting a bunch of dahlias on the peach table and walking off with a bag of peaches, no words exchanged. A kid being paid in strawberries to hold a tent pole. A great deal changed hands in the next two hours, and nothing was sold.

Then somebody rang a cowbell at eight, and the prices appeared on little chalkboards as if they had been there all along, and I was a customer. The bread woman took my money for a second loaf like she had never seen me in her life. I don’t think she was being rude. I think the woman who gave me the heel had gone wherever she goes at eight, and the one who was left had a till to balance. There are two markets on that lot every Saturday. Only one of them has a price for anything, and it is not the one I’d drive back for.

And speaking of the hours before the hour: this week’s three stories all happen before anything opens, and every one of them ends when it does. An English fish hall where the ice plant dies at ten to three and the woman who is the ice has forty blocks to spread over a seventy-block morning. Two tea stalls on the path outside a grain market in South Sudan, eleven counted years of argument, and one root of ginger broken in half before the first customer is in earshot. And a tavern in Haarlem in the winter of 1636, where a prosperous stranger from Hamburg buys twelve hundred grains’ weight of something still in the ground, and pays for the room’s drinks, and stays to the end. Come early. Read them before the bell. And then pass them on. Tell somebody.

(Next issue: The Off-Season — the market is closed, and the story belongs to whoever stays.)

— The Editor