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“Slow day?” he asked.

Signy smirked as she fetched herself a cup from the shelf. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Otto chuckled. “Now, where’s the fun in that?”

A growler of lager sat waiting on the counter, as usual. Signy filled her cup, as usual, chuckling along with her host but playing coy with the question, as usual. Otto’s favorite pastime was to sit by the window, listen to his late husband’s music, and study the never-ending theater of the street (sometimes through binoculars). He was an expert in this endeavor. His assessment of the flow of customers in and out of her shop had become something of a game between them over the years. He’d pry, she’d dodge, and so it went. Underneath it, Otto understood Signy’s commitment to discretion; he was her customer, too, after all. He would never actually snoop into private business—at least, not when it was serious. But Otto was a playful man, and this bit he never tired of.

Otto continued to stir the pot. “You didn’t have more than three or four come in today,” he remarked.

Signy sat down at the table and set her cup upon it. She’d stopped offering to help with the cooking long ago, because he never wanted her to, which was fine, because she was no good at it. “A light crowd doesn’t mean I’m not busy,” she said. “You can’t see everyone I talk to.”

“Oh, I’m well aware,” Otto lamented. “It’s the great hardship of my life.”

Signy eyed the pot and the items gathered beside it: a box of stock cubes, a jar of flour, a mixing bowl filled with dough. “Are you making dumplings?” she asked, hoping the answer was yes.

“In theory, if the broth ever comes together.”

Signy’s day improved another notch with this news. Moreover, she was as unconcerned about the broth as she had been about Darcy’s performance. Otto was an amazing cook, and he always did this, he always complained about his inadequacies before presenting a meal that made you want to lick the plate clean.

Friday dinners were not Otto’s payment for the bottle of freshly printed medicine Signy carried in her skirt pocket. It would’ve been awful to make an old man empty his pantry for the sake of keeping his blood pressure steady. No, Otto cooked dinner for Signy on Fridays because they were friends, and the thing he loved to do for his friends was cook. And just as she’d stopped offering to help him in the kitchen, she likewise no longer tried to give him money for the ingredients. Why in the hell would I pad my savings account for people I’ll never meet was always his reply. Otto was seventy-four years old—one of the oldest people alive. Signy wasn’t about to argue anything that made him happy, and especially not his drop dumpling soup. This recipe was one of her favorites, and the gesture of him preparing it for her now made her feel as warm as the kitchen itself.

Otto turned his head back over his shoulder again, nodding toward something on the table. “Ramona left that for you.” He stopped and took a closer look at his guest. “I love that skirt. Is that new?”

“Yes,” Signy said. She smiled a little as she ran her hands down the sides of the garment in question. A good, dark purple with good, deep pockets. She liked it, too.

She received a nod of approval from the man wearing ironed slacks with cuffs rolled just so even though he hadn’t left the house that day. “Gorgeous color. Your tailor?”

Signy kept a straight face. “Yes, my tailor.” Another customer of hers, they both meant.

Otto drew her attention to the kitchen table again, this time pointing with his cooking spoon. “Don’t leave it behind, or she’ll be devastated.”

Signy looked to the table and sighed at the sight of a pocket-sized lucky turtle, printed in garish glittered teal. Ramona—the third flatmate, age sixty-two, sweet as pie, and decidedly off her rocker—sold charms of this sort from atop a folding table down by the ferry station (on Fridays, she visited her son and daughter-in-law on raft eight). Signy picked up the tacky winged turtle with thumb and forefinger. Its smiling face had dried a bit lopsided, and the print seam wasn’t sanded very well. “How much luck does she think I need?” Signy asked.

“If you ask her, she’s the only thing keeping any of us alive,” Otto said.

Signy sighed again. This was probably the sixth turtle by now, plus two starbursts, three unicorns, and a love magnet, all of which lived in a drawer in her shop. Signy had come close to tossing them in the melt bin on multiple occasions, but she’d never had the heart. Ramona made charms for Signy because Ramona cared.

Signy dutifully deposited the trinket in her pocket, swapping it for the bottle of medicine. Vitamin C, the label read.

Otto’s head perked up. “Ooh, do that again.”

“What?” Signy took the bottle back in hand. “This?”

Otto lay down his spoon, turned toward her, put his free hand in his pocket, and listened intently. “Again.” She repeated the action, but he shook his head. “No, no, the way you did it before”—he gestured in a vague loop, as though he were trying to rewind time—“rattle rattle, then thunk.”

Signy returned the bottle to her pocket, waited a moment, then did it again. Rattle rattle, then thunk.

Otto grinned. “That’s pretty close,” he said. “Don’t know what I’d do with it, but it’s a good sound!”

Before Otto had taken up advanced-level people watching, he’d been a Foley artist at K-CCN (Curtain’s up for adventure, drama, thrills, and chills! You’re listening to K-CCN, the Crimson Curtain! Where you always have the best seats in the house!). If, in the prior fifty years, you had heard a wave crash in a radio play, that was very likely Otto with a tray full of gravel. If you heard thunder, that was Otto, too, waving a piece of scrapped sheet metal. And if you heard weird sounds—sounds of Earth, sounds of animals, sounds of monsters and machines and made-up things—those had been Otto’s specialty. He’d worked on a lot of different shows, not all of which Signy knew, and many of which had preceded her birth, but he had worked steadily on the Saturday Spectacular, which Signy had caught from time to time. It was funny, thinking that mixed into the background of all the hazily remembered moments of her childhood, there’d been sounds made by a man who would, years later, shift the entire course of her life.

Sounds made by him and Henry both, of course. Otto’s husband had been a composer. He, too, had grown old, but not quite as old. Signy had never met him, but sometimes, when Otto was feeling a particular way, she’d sit in the living room with him after dinner and listen to worlds made real by two complementary minds. Drums plus sheet metal summoned a storm. Strings plus lapping waves cleared the sky. The pair of them had made magic, and thanks to the boxes of recordings that filled Otto’s shelves, that magic could be revived at any time.

Otto turned back to the stove and began to drop spoonfuls of dough into the steaming pot. “So you know the short man who came in to see you today? The one with the orange boots?”

Signy rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

“Is he a customer, or a customer like me?”