Issue № 5 Before the Bell
A fish hall whose ice plant dies at ten to three; two tea stalls on the path to a grain market, ten feet and eleven years apart; a Haarlem tavern in the winter of 1636, where a stranger buys a weight of something still in the ground. Come early. The market isn’t the market yet.
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.
The ice plant dies at ten to three on a Friday in June, the fitter can’t come before Monday, and eleven stalls of fish are already on the lorries. Forty blocks under sawdust against a seventy-block morning, and every price in the hall moves before a customer sees one.
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Two tea stalls on the path to Marol Market, ten feet apart, and eleven counted years of argument about sugar, ginger, and whose fire the grain men smell first. Achol’s kettle boils first. It always does. Anyone would tell you.
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A tavern in Haarlem, a winter evening in 1636, and a grain man from Hamburg who has been coming eleven weeks and wants to be one of the men who is told things first. A watercolour of a flower nobody can see, twelve hundred grains’ weight of something still in the ground, and the round that seals it.
Read the story → 9 min