One Hundred and Fifty Steps

The old magician lived approximately one hundred and fifty steps from the two bookshops. I know this because I counted them later. At the time, I had no reason to count anything. I was walking Cherry in the park, and if you were walking west with your back turned against the sun in the afternoon, the two bookshops were just there, at the end of the street, one beside the other. One had been there for years. The other had changed owners so many times that nobody could remember what it had originally been. The old man was known around Brooklyn as a pigeon feeder, although he had worked at various things before that. In his younger days, according to him, he had been involved with the art world. He had gone to art school. He had known painters, sculptors, people who disappeared for months and came back with new names. In the evenings they would share someone’s basement, a place they called the Rooms, where they drank cheap wine and talked until morning.

The owner of the bookshop had known him from those days. The man’s real name was Morris Mage Magrila. Or so he said. Usually people just called him Morris. Sometimes, when he was in the mood for it, he called himself the Magician. I had heard the name before, but only in passing. My father had mentioned him once or twice when I was younger, although never in any way that suggested Morris was important. There are people who occupy the edges of your family history without ever becoming part of your own life. Morris had been one of those people.

Until the afternoon I met him.

Cherry was with me. That afternoon he had decided that he wanted to stand in the middle of the path and watch a group of pigeons. I waited. The pigeons moved. Cherry did not. Then the old man approached. He came toward us slowly, carrying a small paper bag in one hand. He was wearing a dark coat even though it wasn’t cold. He stopped beside Cherry.

“May I?” He pointed toward the dog.

“Sure.”

He put his hand on Cherry’s head. Cherry looked up at him. The old man scratched behind his ear. Cherry leaned against his leg. There was something familiar about his face. Not familiar in the ordinary way. I had never seen him before, or at least I didn’t think I had. It was more like recognizing someone from a photograph you had never actually seen. Then he looked at me.

“You look like Shiela.”

I didn’t answer. He waited.

“You knew Shiela?”

“I knew your father.”

That was not what I had asked. I remember looking down at Cherry because I didn’t know what else to do. The old man seemed to understand.

“Your father used to bring her here.”

“Here?”

“The bookshop.”

He pointed toward the end of the street. I knew the bookshop. Everyone in the neighborhood did. It had a narrow front window, a green door, and a stone statue standing outside it. The statue was a fae. It wasn’t beautiful. That was part of what made it memorable. Its hair had been worn smooth by the weather, and one of its wings was cracked near the base. Children used to leave coins beside it. Sometimes flowers. Once I saw somebody leave a cigarette. Morris followed my eyes.

“She liked that statue.”

“Shiela?”

He nodded.

“She used to sit beside it.” Shiela had been my father’s first love, or so I had been told, although by the time I was old enough to ask questions she had already been dead for years. Her name survived mostly in fragments. My father did not speak about her. My grandmother spoke about her even less. Morris put his hands into his coat pockets.

“You want to see the shop?”

The sun was low enough that the trees cast long shadows across the path. Cherry walked ahead of us, stopping every few seconds to smell things that had no apparent importance. Morris didn’t hurry. Neither did I. After a while he began telling me about the bookshop. He said the owner had known him since art school. He said that in those days there had been a group of them who met in basements after dark. They called one particular basement the Rooms, although Morris said there had been nothing remarkable about it. We kept walking.

Morris opened the door. A small bell rang above us. The smell was the first thing I noticed. It was old paper, dust, something sweet and slightly burnt. It reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen, although I couldn’t say exactly why. Maybe it was the butter. Maybe onions. Maybe something she used to cook when I was little and had forgotten the name of. I stood in the doorway. The shop was narrow, with shelves reaching almost to the ceiling. There were books on the floor, books piled beside the counter, books stacked sideways on top of other books. Some had price stickers. Some didn’t. There were old newspapers in one corner and a ladder against the back wall. The fae statue could be seen through the front window. From inside, it looked different. Smaller. Morris noticed me looking. “Don’t worry about her.”

“Her?”

“The statue.”

“What?”

He shrugged.

“She’s been here longer than either of us.”

A man behind the counter liften his head. He was very old, and for a second I thought he might be the owner Morris had told me about. The man stared at me.

Then at Cherry.

“That’s a big dog.”

“He’s a Great Dane.”

“I know what he is.”

Cherry sat down. The man smiled. “He’s welcome.” Morris walked farther into the shop, and I followed. I didn’t buy anything that day. Morris seemed to expect this. He walked toward the back of the shop and began pulling books from the shelves without looking at their titles. He would take one down, open it somewhere in the middle, read a few lines, then put it back. Cherry followed him. The man behind the counter had returned to his newspaper. I stood near the window, and then asked Morris who owned the shop.

“The man at the counter.”

“I mean before him.” He put the book in his hand back on the shelf.

“The shop belonged to a woman named Sheila.”

I thought I had heard him incorrectly.

“Do you mean my father’s lover?”

“No.” He said it quietly. “She never owned the shop.”

“But you said—”

“I said Shiela came here.” He walked past me toward the front window. For a moment he stood looking at the statue. “She used to come here with your father.”

“When?”

“Before you were born.” Morris put his hand against the glass. I looked at him. Then he walked away. That afternoon he showed me the shelves. Not all of them. Only the ones he thought I would like. He had a strange way of choosing books. He didn’t ask what I liked. He didn’t ask what I had read. He simply took things down and handed them to me.

“This one.” Then another. “Not this one.” Then another. “Read the first page.” I did. He watched me. “Well?”

“I don’t know.” He took the book back. Cherry had fallen asleep beneath the table. The owner came out from behind the counter carrying a cup of tea. “You’ll get used to him,” he said.

“To Morris?”

“To all of it.”

I stayed until the shop closed. When I left, Morris came with me. We stood outside for a while. The street had become quieter. The park was almost empty, and the windows of the buildings opposite us had begun to light up one by one. Morris pointed toward the statue.

“Sheila used to talk to her.”

I laughed. “The statue?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“Things.”

“What things?”

Morris looked at me.

“Things she didn’t want your father to hear.”

Then he walked away. I stood there for a moment. Cherry pulled at the leash. We went home. After that, I began seeing Morris more often. At first it was accidental. I would take Cherry to the park and find him feeding the pigeons. Sometimes he was sitting on a bench. Sometimes he was walking along the edge of the pond. Sometimes he wasn’t there at all, and I would find myself looking for him. Then I started going to the bookshop. I never made a decision to become a regular. It simply happened. Morris was almost always there. He began keeping a chair for me near the back window. He never said this was my chair. It simply became mine. Cherry would lie underneath it while I read. He told me stories about Brooklyn. Not the Brooklyn people wrote about in books. His Brooklyn. The painters who couldn’t pay rent. The old cinemas that had become supermarkets. The men who claimed to be poets but spent most of their time borrowing money. The women who disappeared from one neighborhood and turned up years later in another. He told me about art school. He told me about the Rooms. There had been seven of them, he said. Seven young people who thought they were going to change the world.

One afternoon I asked him about magic.

“What magic?”

“The magician thing.”

He laughed.

“So you were one?”

“I was many things,” he replied.

“What kind of magician?”

“The kind people paid to watch.”

Then Cherry got up and walked toward the back of the shop. Morris watched him. “He’s been there before.” I thought he was joking. He stood up and followed Cherry. I followed them. At the end of the shop was a narrow corridor I had never noticed before. It was darker than the rest of the store. There was a door at the end. Morris put his hand on the handle. Then he stopped.

“Not today.”

“What?” I did not understand half the things he said to me.

“You’re not ready to see what happens to a story after you finish reading it.”

Then he closed the door. We went back upstairs. I didn’t ask him again. Not that day. But after that, I started noticing things. The books Morris kept behind the counter. The notebooks he never let anyone touch. The people who came into the shop and asked for him by name. And, every now and then, the old woman who would stand outside the window and look in without ever entering. The first time I saw her, Morris saw her too. His face changed. Only for a second. Then he said: “Don’t let her talk to you.” I looked through the window. The woman was standing beside the fae statue. She was staring directly at me. And then, very slowly, she smiled.

The woman stayed outside for a long time. She didn’t knock on the window or come inside. She simply stood beside the fae statue with her hands folded in front of her, looking through the glass. Morris had gone back to the counter, sorting receipts. When I asked who she was, he first called her a customer, then admitted she wasn’t one. He told me not to talk to her because she wanted something, though he didn’t know what. By the time I looked back through the window, she was gone.

I went outside anyway. Morris followed with Cherry’s leash, warning me not to follow people. I told him I hadn’t been following her, only looking for her, which he said was worse. There was nobody on the street and nothing in the direction of the park. After a while, Morris told me to come back. Instead of taking me through the front, he led me through the back and unlocked a narrow door at the end of the corridor.

The room beyond was smaller than I expected. A desk, a chair, two lamps, and shelves filled with notebooks. Hundreds of them. Some were tied together with string, some had names on their covers, others dates. Morris picked one up and explained that a life story was what a person thought had happened to them, while the notebook contained what had happened. He handed it to me. The name on the first page belonged to someone I knew, someone still alive whom I had seen and spoken to in the neighborhood. The notebook described something that had happened to them when they were twelve: a summer afternoon, a bicycle, a boy falling from a wall, a mother shouting from a window. But the story said the boy had died. When I told Morris that he hadn’t, he only said, “Not yet.”

The pages continued. The boy lived, grew up, left Brooklyn, married, had two children, became a doctor. Morris admitted that he had written it and called it a possibility. I thought it was a trick. He told me to read it aloud. I did. Nothing happened at first, and I was beginning to feel stupid when Cherry suddenly barked. Morris looked toward the door and made me read it again. This time, when I reached the last sentence, something crashed downstairs. Then the front door opened.

Morris went downstairs and told me to stay where I was, but I followed. The owner of the bookshop stood behind the counter, pale. He asked Morris whether he had given me one of the stories. Morris said no, but the man looked at the notebook in my hands and understood. He said I shouldn’t have been brought there. Morris insisted that he hadn’t brought me. For several seconds nobody spoke. I remember only the sound of Cherry’s nails against the wooden floor and the fae statue outside the window. For the first time, I noticed that it wasn’t looking toward the street. It was looking toward the bookshop, toward us. Morris followed my eyes and told me not to worry about her, but he no longer sounded amused. He sounded afraid.

For the next few weeks, Morris refused to explain anything. Whenever I asked about the notebooks, the woman, or the fae statue, he changed the subject. I began to understand that this was his particular way of answering questions. He did not lie exactly. He simply moved the answer somewhere else.

One afternoon I asked why he had shown me the first notebook. He was repairing an old watch behind the counter and denied having given me anything at all. When I reminded him that I had been holding the book, he said that didn’t mean he had given it to me. Eventually he admitted that he had let me read it because he knew I wouldn’t have stopped asking. It was probably the closest thing to an explanation I was going to get.

After that, we became closer, slowly and without either of us acknowledging it. I began staying after the shop closed. Morris made coffee, Cherry slept beneath the table, and we talked about nothing until the conversation somehow turned to my father. Morris sometimes told me things I already knew and sometimes things I didn’t believe. Eventually I trusted him. First he let me stay late, then he let me into the back room, and finally, one evening, he gave me a thin notebook with no name on the cover. He told me to read it to myself because he wanted to know whether I could tell the difference between what had happened and what had been written.

The notebook described an ordinary man living on the third floor of a Brooklyn apartment building with his wife, two children, and a dog. He worked at a post office, woke at six, drank coffee, went to work, came home, listened to his wife complain that he was never there, and listened to his son ask for a bicycle while his daughter dreamed of leaving Brooklyn. Then, halfway through the story, a sentence appeared that didn’t belong: On the afternoon of October 17, the man decided not to come home.

The story split after that. In one version, the man left work, walked three blocks, entered a bar, met someone, gave them a letter, and disappeared. In the other, he eventually went home. Both versions continued at once. I stopped reading and asked Morris whose life it was, but he only asked whether it mattered and told me to keep reading.

A week later, I read one aloud. Then another. We told nobody. Morris insisted that the world didn’t need to know how it worked, and when I asked what would happen if people found out, he said they wouldn’t believe us. We began with small things: a missed train, a broken engagement, a lost wallet, a woman who wished she had taken another job. Nothing seemed dangerous. The stories worked without anything dramatic happening. The next time I saw those people, their lives simply contained different facts. The man had never lost his wallet. The woman had taken the other job. The engagement had never happened. When I mentioned the versions I remembered, they looked at me as though I had invented them.

Morris was delighted. He called it history. Soon we began doing it for money. The first person paid fifty dollars, the second a hundred, and by the third we had a system: people came with regrets, we gave them stories, they read them, and their past changed. Because nobody remembered the old version except us, there was no way to prove what we had done. For a while, it felt almost harmless.

Then the complaints started.

The complaints began with small things. A man came into the shop one morning and accused Morris of ruining his life. His wife had left him, his business had failed, and his brother had died, all after he had come to the shop. Morris barely reacted. He told the man not to come back, then insisted that whatever had happened was the man’s own doing. When the man left, he paused beside the fae statue before disappearing down the street. I asked Morris whether he had been telling the truth. Morris said probably, then dismissed the story as unimportant. By then I knew that when Morris called something unimportant, he usually meant the opposite.

More people came after that. Some were angry, some frightened, one woman cried, and another threatened to call the police. Morris dismissed them all, insisting that people blamed the wrong things. When I accused us of changing their pasts, he corrected me: we hadn’t changed anything, he said. We had given them stories, and they had chosen to read them. I hated the answer, but I knew he was right about one thing. They had all chosen. That was what made it difficult.

The business grew, and we became selective. We refused requests to bring back dead children, restore youth, or erase crimes. Smaller regrets were different. A woman wanted to forget the day her husband left. A man wanted to have accepted a job twenty years earlier. A painter wanted to have met a different gallery owner. Those stories we wrote. After a while, I stopped being surprised by the results. I would read a story aloud, and the next morning the world would contain different facts. Sometimes only one person had changed. Sometimes an entire chain of events changed with them.

Morris kept records of everything: names, dates, payments, consequences. He called the notebooks ledgers. When I asked why he bothered, he said somebody had to remember because the people who came to us didn’t. That was when I understood that Morris wasn’t doing this because he loved magic. Later, I became aware that he loved being the only person who knew what had really happened.

Then, one afternoon, the woman from beside the fae statue came into the shop. She ignored Morris and looked directly at me, asking whether I was the one who read the stories. Morris came from the back room and tried to dismiss her, but she accused him of having promised that it would stop. She told me I shouldn’t be there. Morris stepped between us and ordered her to leave. She whispered something I couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it made Morris go pale. She smiled and told him to tell me, then walked out.

I asked what she had said. Morris refused to answer until, finally, he told me she had said Shiela’s name. I froze. He gave no explanation, and I didn’t ask again. That evening I took Cherry home early and stayed away from the shop for three days.

On the fourth day, Morris called. His voice sounded almost cheerful as he asked me to come by because he had something for me: a new story. I nearly hung up, but then he said it was about Sylvie. I had never heard the name before. Still, the moment he said it, I knew I was going back to the bookshop.

I went back the next afternoon. Morris was sitting by the window with the newspaper, and Cherry went straight beneath the table. Nothing looked different. That was what bothered me. After everything that had happened, I expected the shop to have changed somehow, but the shelves, the light, the fae statue, even the smell of dust, old paper, burnt butter, and my grandmother’s kitchen were exactly the same.

Morris had something waiting for me: a thin envelope with my first name written on it. Inside were six pages in his handwriting, the story of a woman named Sylvie. It described her ordinary life in Brooklyn, her mother, her childhood, the books she liked, and the man she had once loved before he left. Then the story reached the part where she disappeared. Sylvie had come to the bookshop, spoken to Morris, been given a story, and read it. Afterward she had become trapped inside another version of her life.

She had tried to leave, but every time she reached the end of the street, she found herself back at the bookshop. Whenever she called someone, they forgot the conversation. Whenever she wrote her own name, the letters disappeared. I asked Morris whether it was real. He told me to read the last page. There was only one sentence: If you’re reading this, I’m still here.

I barely had time to react before Morris warned me not to read the story aloud. He said that if I did, Sylvie would know where I was. I laughed because I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Then the telephone rang. Neither of us moved. It rang again, then a third time. Cherry lifted his head. Morris told me not to answer, but I picked up the receiver anyway. There was silence at first. Then a woman’s voice asked whether I was the man who read the stories. Before I could answer, she said my name. She introduced herself as Sylvie. Morris had gone completely still. I asked where she was. She said she didn’t know, not exactly, only that she had been there for three days. When I asked where, she said, “The shop.” She began crying quietly, as if she were trying not to let someone hear her. Then she warned me not to give Morris the books because they were going to get me too, whatever that meant. When I asked who they were, the line went dead. Morris took the receiver from my hand and hung up. I asked who Sylvie was. He tried to walk away, but when I pressed him, he finally admitted that she was one of them. I asked who they were. He looked toward the fae statue through the window. His face seemed suddenly older. Then he said, “The people who remember.”

I didn’t understand what Morris meant by the people who remember, and he refused to explain. Instead, he told me to go home. I took Cherry and stayed away from the shop for several days, but Sylvie’s voice kept returning to me, especially the way she had said he’s here. I began thinking about the notebooks and wondering how many people had read them, how many remembered the lives they had before, and whether I remembered mine correctly.

There were small things I couldn’t remember: a summer when I was eight, a birthday, the name of a boy who had once lived next door. I had always assumed that was normal. Now I wasn’t sure. One evening, while looking through an old box beneath my grandmother’s bed, I found photographs of my father and Shiela. Most were familiar. One wasn’t. It showed my father, much younger, standing outside the bookshop beside Morris and Shiela. All three were looking at the camera, but neither my father nor Shiela was smiling. Morris was. On the back, someone had written: The last day before the Rooms.

I took the photograph to the bookshop the next morning. Morris wasn’t there. The owner was behind the counter, and when he saw the photograph, his expression changed. He asked where I had found it, then identified the writing on the back as the Rooms. When I asked what they were, he told me to ask Morris. I pressed him, but he only said that perhaps I wasn’t supposed to know. When I asked whether my father and Shiela knew about the stories, he finally looked toward the window and told me that my father had written the first one.

He said it was a story about Shiela, one Morris had never finished. Before I could ask where it was, the bell above the door rang and Morris walked in. He stopped when he saw the photograph. The owner had already disappeared into the back room. Morris admitted that my father had written a story about Shiela because he wanted to bring her back. He looked at the statue, “That’s where it started.”

I asked what had started there.

“The first mistake.”

I went outside. Morris followed, but didn’t stop me as I crouched beside the fae statue to read the worn inscription at its base. Most of it had disappeared, but I could make out SHE IS GONE… before the rest was lost. When I rubbed my thumb over the stone, Morris told me not to. He sat on the bench beside the statue, Cherry at his feet, while people crossed the park as if nothing had changed. A woman pushed a stroller, two boys kicked a ball, and an old man walked a small white dog. I asked Morris to tell me about my father, starting with Shiela.

Morris said my father had loved her, but not simply in the way I had been told. He had loved her with the certainty young people sometimes have that love can fix things, including death. Shiela had been sick, and my father couldn’t accept it. So he wrote the story to save her. In the story, Shiela had never become sick. She lived, but my father still remembered the old life, because he and Morris had read the story. For a while, Shiela was alive in the new version of the world, while the two of them alone remembered watching her die. My father eventually asked Morris to change it back because he could no longer live with remembering both lives. He couldn’t tell which one had been real.

Morris explained that this was what the stories did. They didn’t change the past. They changed what people remembered about it. I thought of Sylvie, the people who remembered, the woman outside the window, my father, and Shiela. When I asked what happened to Shiela, Morris said she died again. My father died too, but Morris corrected me when I said I already knew that. I knew that my father had died. I didn’t know what had happened before.

Back inside the empty shop, Morris went straight to the back room and opened a drawer filled with dozens of old envelopes. He took out a yellowed one with my name written across it in my father’s handwriting. He told me my father had asked him to keep it before he died. Inside was a single page with three lines: If Morris gives you a story, don’t read it. If you’ve already read it, don’t believe what you remember. And if you find Shiela, don’t tell her about the bookshop.

I read the last line twice. Morris turned toward the window, where the fae statue stood reflected in the glass. For a moment, I thought I saw a woman standing beside it. Then the reflection shifted, and there was nobody there. Morris quietly told me, “Not anymore.”

I didn’t go home that night. I walked Cherry through the park until it was too dark to see the paths, then sat on a bench watching the lights come on in the buildings around us. I kept thinking about my father’s letter, especially the words If you’ve already read it, don’t believe what you remember. I had read it twice, then again in my head. But the last line bothered me most: If you find Shiela. Not remember her. Not see her. Find her. I asked Cherry if he remembered her. He looked at me, then went back to chasing a pigeon.

The next morning I went to the bookshop. Morris opened the locked door just enough to tell me I shouldn’t be there, then let me in. The shop looked smaller than usual, with fewer books on the counter, the chair by the window gone, and the back-room door closed. I let him know I was looking for Shiela. For the first time, he looked genuinely tired. He reminded me that she was dead and told me to stop looking for her. I showed him the letter and asked why my father had told me to find her. Morris finally explained that my father had changed his mind. At first he had wanted Shiela alive. Later, he wanted to know whether she had ever been alive at all. Changing a life, Morris said, eventually makes you forget which version you wanted.

He eventually opened the back room and showed me one of my father’s notebooks, though he warned me there were things inside that my father hadn’t wanted me to know. I grabbed it anyway. Most pages were blank, but two sentences appeared near the back: Shiela remembers. A few pages later: Sheila doesn’t remember. The spelling was wrong.

I looked at the page again.

Shiela.

No.

Sheila.

I couldn’t remember which one I had seen first.

I wrote her name at the top of a new page.

Shiela.

I stared at it for a while. Something about it looked wrong. I crossed out the i and wrote it again.

Sheila.

That looked worse.

That afternoon I stayed until closing. Cherry slept beneath the table while Morris made coffee. At six, the old woman appeared outside beside the fae statue, watching Morris rather than me. He locked the door, turned off the lights, and waited until she disappeared. When I asked who she was, he called her someone from before the shop. I asked if he meant before the Rooms. Morris answered no. Before she left, he told me I needed to stop coming to the shop. I reminded him that he’d wanted me there. He said he had, but something had changed. When I asked what, he looked at the door and said, “You.” At the time, I thought he was blaming me.

The following week, people began coming to the shop demanding their money back. Their lives had changed in ways they hadn’t expected: one man’s wife remembered a different marriage, a woman claimed her dead brother had begun appearing in photographs, and another man remembered two childhoods. Morris refused to see them and left me to deal with the complaints. I started returning their money, but that only made things worse. They wanted new stories to restore their old lives. One man declared that Morris had been doing this for thirty years. When Morris finally accepted it, he said maybe forty. He explained that he’d once believed he could fix people, then called himself a magician. I called him a scammer. He smiled and said the two weren’t always different.

His years in the art world, the galleries and private parties, the people who paid him to perform, the Rooms, the debts, the forged paintings, and the people who trusted him and lost money… He had moved between Brooklyn, Manhattan, Paris, and London before returning to Brooklyn because, as he put it, nobody remembers you forever. That was what he liked about the shop. People forgot. When I asked whether he had scammed my father, he said yes. When I asked about Sheila, he said no, because she knew him.

A few days later, Morris stopped coming to the shop.Then Sylvie called. She warned me not to go there because someone was waiting for me. Before I could ask who, she told me not to give Morris any more books.

“I don’t have any.”

“You do.”

I looked around the room. Beside me, on the floor, was a notebook I had never seen before. My name was written on the cover.

“Sylvie?”

The line went dead. I opened the notebook. The first page was blank. I waited. Then, beneath the empty line, words began appearing one at a time. The narrator is sitting at home. I closed the book. Cherry stood and went to the front door. Someone knocked three times. I didn’t move. A minute later came three more knocks, followed by a voice calling me by my name. I looked at Cherry. He was staring at the door. Outside stood the woman from the bookshop. Her face was the same as the statue’s. Her lips were slightly parted, and tears of stone ran slowly down her cheeks. I didn’t open the door.

The next morning she was gone.

For the following week, I tried to return to the bookshop. I knew where it was. I had been there dozens of times. I knew the green door, the narrow window, the shelves, the chair by the back window. But every street led somewhere else. I walked past the park three times. I passed the same bakery twice. Once, I found the two bookshops, but neither was the one I remembered. There was no fae statue. There was no green door. There was only an empty storefront with dust on the glass. Later, I read in the newspaper that Morris Mage Magrila had been “hunted down” by one of his illusions. I read the article twice. Then a third time. I recognized the name, but I couldn’t remember from where. Cherry and I went out for a walk. We crossed the park slowly. The afternoon sun was behind us, and the shadows of the trees stretched across the path. About a hundred and fifty steps from the place where I thought the bookshop had been, Cherry stopped. I waited for him.

He was looking at something beside the path. There was a small stone statue there. One of its wings was cracked near the base. I stared at it for a long time. I couldn’t remember having seen it before.