Notes from the Bench

Wear is a record of habit, not of intention. This is how I read a worn object, and how I put that reading to work in the fiction I write.

They wanted to know at the shop where a retired postmistress gets to when she puts on her coat at five. One Tuesday answers it. A For Sale sign turns up in a yard that would never carry one, the town builds the wrong story around it by suppertime, and it falls to Dot to put the record straight in a single sentence, aimed at the one ear that will carry it nowhere else.

A well-made machine from the last century outlasts the household that bought it. The old ones were built to be opened and kept, and I try to give the ones I write the history they actually have.

The carrier comes down off its shelf at nine, and by the time Connie straightens up the front window is empty. Three people who each know the shop differently go looking, and only one of them thinks to ask where it is warm.

Bus has the front window at Open Ticket Repair, and once Connie locks the door the shop is his. One cool night in May a sparrow is shut in with him, off the dark glass and into the day's small repairs, with no one there until morning.