One Stall, Two Rivals

For nine years Liesel had sold her honey-cakes at stall fourteen, and for eight of them Anton had sold his roasted almonds directly across the lane, and they had perfected the art of hating each other politely.

It was a clean rivalry, the kind a small market needs. He undercut her mulled price by twenty cents; she opened ten minutes earlier; he had once, scandalously, scented his almonds with cardamom, which everyone knew was her spice. They never raised their voices. They simply waged a long, courteous war of glühwein and gingerbread across four metres of cobblestone, and Liesel would have told you she preferred it that way. She had been a widow long enough to find the warmth of a feud easier to carry than other kinds.

Then the river came up in the night.

She arrived in the blue dark before opening to find half the market a wreck — canvas down, stalls buckled, the lane a sheet of black ice and floodwater. Stall fourteen was gone. Anton's, across the way, was gone. And the market master, grey with no sleep, was moving down the row delivering the same flat sentence to everyone: one stall each that can still stand, two traders to a booth, take it or go home for the season.

He paired them, of course. Of course he did.

"Absolutely not," said Anton, at the exact moment Liesel said the same words, which was the first thing they had agreed on in eight years and did nothing toimprove either of their moods.

"It's the only roof on the square that didn't fold," the master said, already walking off. "Sort it out or sort out your Decembers without an income. Your choice."

So they sorted it out. Badly, at first. They drew a chalk line down the centre of the counter, his almonds west, her cakes east, the glühwein urn placed precisely on the border like a contested flag. They served their customers around each other with the elaborate iciness of two cats sharing a windowsill. When his queue spilled into her half she charged him rent in stollen; when her oven warmed his side he claimed it as occupied territory.

But it was very cold, and the booth was very small, and the season has a way of wearing people down to the softer thing underneath.

By the third evening she noticed he made the glühwein the way she did — clove-heavy, a strip of orange peel — though he'd sworn for years that hers was oversweet. By the fourth, when her hands were too numb to hold the ladle, he poured for her customers without being asked and put the coins, every one, on her side of the chalk. By the fifth, a child came asking for "the cardamom almonds the lady makes," and Anton said, "She makes the cakes. I make the almonds," and the child said, "But you smell the same," and they did not look at each other for a full minute because they were both, suddenly, looking at the small dangerous truth of it.

Snow began to fall through the gap in the canvas above them, slow, lit gold by the stall lamp.

"You scented them with cardamom," Liesel said quietly. "Years ago. On purpose."

Anton stirred the urn that was hers and his now, and didn't deny it. "It was the only way I could think of," he said, "to be in your half of the lane."

The line on the counter was still there in white