From the Editor’s Desk

I walked a boardwalk once in the first week of March, which is the worst week to walk a boardwalk. Everything was shut. The shutters had the kind of rust that only grows in wind. The only open door for a mile was a shed behind the carousel, and in it a man was repainting a horse. He had the horse up on sawhorses and he was doing the bridle in red, one strap at a time, with a brush about the size of a pencil. I asked him who it was for, since nobody would ride it until June. He said it was for the horse. Then he said that wasn’t true, it was for him, because in June he’d be selling tickets and wouldn’t get to look at it.

I have thought about that man more than I have thought about most carousels. In season, a market is something everybody does together, and it’s very good at hiding who is actually holding it up. In the off-season you find out. It’s whoever still has a key, whoever knows which pipe freezes, whoever brings the soup. The place is still there. It’s just being kept, instead of being used.

And speaking of who stays: this week’s three stories all happen with the shutters down. A seaside square that winters nine stallholders and puts the whole market up for one hour, for a wedding, with nothing on any counter and one honest sale. A covered market on the Catalan coast let out in the dead months to a wedding-photo crew, where a woman who has weighed fruit for thirty-two years is asked to weigh rented resin lemons, and notices the cherries. And a boardwalk auction house in February 1986, a green wing chair, and a thirty-year-old debt worked out on a calculator tape. Two of these stories found the same idea from opposite ends, a market dressed up with nothing to sell, and we left them that way on purpose. The off-season does that. There are only so many people left on the square. Read them slowly, it’s winter. And then pass them on. Tell somebody.

(Next issue: The Same Corner — the same market site, in an era of the writer’s choosing, and one recurring landmark appears.)

— The Editor