“What are you selling?” His eyebrows part in a gesture of curiosity, his skin pale and unscarred—he hasn’t spent as much time outdoors as most of the other people I’ve met—and his eyes are a clear, bright green.
“We’re not open yet,” I answer sharply.
“But when you are, what will you sell?”
“It’s a cure-all tonic.”
His upper lip curls, nose scrunched, tugging together the freckles scattered across his cheekbones. He can’t be more than ten or eleven—although I’ve never known anyone his age, so I can’t be certain. “What does the tonic do?”
I think of the pill I took back at the farmhouse, how it dulled the ache in my ribs, and allowed me to sleep. “It relieves pain.”
The boy nods, squinting up at me. “I’ll take two bottles.”
“We’re not open,” I repeat.
“You’d turn away a customer?” His voice is quick, punctuated, like he has somewhere he needs to be. He wipes at his forehead, atthe layer of dirt on his skin.
“Do you even have any coins?” I ask.
“No,” he answers plainly, eyebrows lifted. “But I can trade.”
“With what?” I’m curious about the stack of items still tucked under his arm. And he sorts through his hoard—no ring visible on his finger—pulling out a long, yellow ribbon the color of a daffodil, and holds it up to me, letting it dangle from his fingertips, smooth as Odie’s mane. But the ends are dirty, as if it’s been dropped into a horse trough. “It needs to be washed,” I point out.
“Nothing a quick scrub won’t fix. And it would look lovely in your hair.”
I feel a tug in my chest, a desire to reach out and touch it, to feel the smoothness of the fabric. I can imagine it tied in a bow, keeping my thick hair off my shoulders. But I could never wear it in the open and risk exposing the mark on my neck.
“I don’t need a ribbon,” I say.
The boy pushes it back into his coat pocket, then draws out something else from beneath his arm: a silver-forged spur, meant to slide onto the heel of a boot, to coax a horse onward with the prick of the spiked metal. “You only have the one? Where’s its pair?”
“Dunno,” the boy answers. “It was gone when I came upon this one.”
“Where’d you come upon it?”
“A dead man, up in the alley behind the Buffalo Saloon.”
“You took it from a dead man’s boot?”
“I took the boots, too,” he says with a curved, clever grin. “But I traded those already. Boots are always in high demand.”
“You’re a scavenger,” I say, scowling down at him, trying toimagine this boy sneaking into homes and campsites, taking whatever he finds. A prick of disgust stabs at my insides.
He lowers the spur to his side and laughs. “I ain’t that ruthless. I’d never kill a man for his things, but I’ll take something if he’s already dead.”
“I don’t want the spur,” I say at last. “I think they’re cruel. A horse doesn’t need pain to drive it forward.”
The boy shrugs.
And when he does, I spy something else under his arm, a flattened piece of paper. Like a page torn from a book. “What’s that?” I ask, pointing.
He slides it out and peers down at it, like he’s unsure what it is. “Can’t say. Traded it from a goat farmer outside of town.”
He holds it up, sun shining across its printed surface, and lets me take it from his hands. It’s a perfect rectangle, the corners of the paper bent a little, a water spot on one edge, but I can still make out the photo. A tall structure is framed at the center of the image, lit with tiny, sparkling lights, wider at its base, then sloping up to a narrow point. It’s taller than any building I’ve ever seen. The bottom of the photo reads:Paris. La Tour Eiffel.I run my thumb along the sharp angles of the building, then turn over the photo, where I find a series of numbers, followed by the wordsTopeka, KS.And handwritten beside this are more words, most blurred out, faded with time.Missed our train… took hours to find a hotel that was… Versailles completely worth… see you in June.My throat dries up, and my eyes begin to water.
“I’ll trade for this,” I say before I can stop myself. “But for one jar of tonic, not two.”
The freckled boy nods quickly, like he’s afraid I’ll change mymind. The paper is worthless to him, a curiosity, nothing more. But I’ve seen others like it—Mom had three of them she kept pressed between the pages of her copy ofNature, Astronomy, and Black Holes.They werepostcards, she said. Photos of places someone visited once—one with a series of snow-peaked mountains calledGlacier National Park; another with a round, strange-looking building with many doorways, and the wordsColosseum, Romein sloped letters in the corner. The last was a dusty-looking landscape with two stone pyramids in the background, and the words:Cairo—the pyramids.
