Hard-Won Walking

He stares out the nicotine-stained window and wishes it was raining harder, hard enough to knock the growing cherry-blossoms off the budding tree that grows outside. He wants to take one, but he doesn't want one that's perfect, he wants one that's been desecrated. He wants to crush it between his fingers and feel it coat the yellow stains that have been a part of him for so long.

If he is honest with himself, he knows that he is wishing death on the cherry blossoms because he is avoiding work, avoiding looking back into his shop and his life and especially at the wooden leg propped up against a statue of an Egyptian god that he's always hated. So has everyone who's ever seen it, because no one's bought it in the decade he's been dealing in antiques, and things that are beautiful sell.

The wooden leg is across the room, which is farther from him than it has been in all the time he's owned the shop. He took it off early in the day, using his dusty antiquities to maneuver his way to his desk, telling himself that it wasn't uncommon for him to do this, that he has not made an unspoken pact with himself to never take it off where someone could see him.

When he first lost his left leg he got around on crutches. Now he gets around with the wooden leg, covered by a pant leg that is stretched just a little too tight, and a cane, his limp heavy and obvious because he they amputated the knee joint when they shouldn't have. He waited too long to buy the leg, and it hurts even now, pulling at muscles he didn't know existed before they pained him. People whisper about it, because he went off so suddenly, and was gone so long, and because he never claims to have lost it in a war. No wars have been fought recently enough for that, and even if they had, he would not lie.

He lost his leg in a South American jungle. He lost it to a crocodile when he was exploring an ancient ruin, but he does not tell the people who come into his shop this, he does not tell anyone this, partly because he thinks it would sound like boasting and partly because he thinks they will not believe it.

Not that he doesn't look the part of an explorer. When he stares in the mirror, he thinks he looks hazy around the edges. Normal people have lines, hard lines telling them were they start and the world ends, but when he looks in the mirror it seems that he and the room he's in are one and the same, that he is not separate from it, that he is not made of the same lines everyone else is. When he has thought this, he strokes the scruffy explorer's beard he cultivates and closes his eyes.

He is looking at wet cherry blossoms and thinking about crocodiles when he hears the chime of someone entering, which is nearly drowned out by the scraping of the heavy door as the customer enters. Dust gathers in a cloud around the man's panama hat and he coughs. He wonders how dust gathers so quickly here. His shop is frequented, and that door is used often. He wonders if other antique shops have this problem. He realizes then that he has never been in another antique shop.

The man is silent, perhaps because he judges the emptiness to be a sign of the shop's lack of popularity. He is wrong. He does not know the shop hums with activity late at night, when coin purses and fisted money changes hands in the dark and whispers and rumors fly like messages in the air. It is then that the shop-owner feels alive, really alive, as though he were back in that forest and capable of running just a little faster.

The customer runs his fingers along the statue of the Egyptian god, giving it a polite look before moving his gaze elsewhere. He spends the next few minutes walking around the shop, his discomfort won out by his obvious pleasure in the artifacts. The shop-owner continues to watch the rain splatter half-heartedly onto the cherry blossoms, but he is smiling. He likes the customer.

The customer stops. He hears it, but he cannot see where he has stopped. He continues to look out the window and waits for him to speak.

"How much is this?" asks the stranger.

He meets the customer's gaze for the first time as the man lifts his hat to run his fingers through straw-yellow hair. Together, their eyes stray to the item the customer is pointing at. It is his wooden leg.

Inexplicably, he feels a strong attachment to it that surfaces from somewhere deep inside him, the same place where he stores information about woman's clothing and the inner workings of clocks. He hates that thing, has always hated it. He cannot say whether he hates it for what it stands for or because the color of it is ugly or because he hates everything, he only knows that in that moment, he does not want to part with it.

"Why do you want it?" His voice is gruffer than he remembers. He sounds like a crotchety old man, although he is not yet thirty-five. He wonders if anyone looks past the face that blends in with mirrors and sees his youth in his eyes.

The customer shrugs. He wears the hat to hide a receding hairline, but the shop-owner thinks it is a bit of a waste. He looks better without the hat.

"I like it."

And there it is. The customer likes it. He doesn't. He knows that when the customer leaves, his fondness for this unhappy piece of wood that has spent a decade attached to an unhappy amputated stump will dissipate like the light, useless drops of rain that sit on the cherry blossoms. He smiles suddenly, and his shape in the grimy mirror across the room solidifies into hard lines.

"How much do you want to pay?" he asks.

When the surprised customer has paid and slung the wooden leg over his vested shoulder, he turns toward the statue of the Egyptian god.

"What about this?" he asks. "There's no price tag on this either."

He looks at the Egyptian statue, with its cold eyes and sharp beak, and sees beauty in it for the first time. He wonders if no one has bought it because there is no price tag attached. How could he have never noticed that?

"No," he says, still smiling. "I like that one."

He reaches an arm out the window and absentmindedly flicks the water off a cherry blossom