Between the eaves of the old street, the last traces of the streetlamps had not yet fully faded. The stone pavement was damp with night dew, gleaming with a thin gray sheen.
I smoothed my skirt. Dianzi fell in behind me, her light green skirt swaying softly.
Two flower shops stood at the corner of the street, pressed extremely close together, with only a narrow wall-crack between them.
Outside the shop on the left, several buckets were set out, stuffed with tulips, ranunculus, and calla lilies. The price tag on each stem read over a hundred.
The owner of the flower shop on the right carried an empty bucket from her own doorway and set it right beside that narrow wall-crack between the two shops.
She carried an armful of white roses from inside her shop and placed them in the empty bucket.
Then she pulled a handful of baby's breath from her apron pocket and tucked it in beside the roses.
She straightened up and shouted toward the doorway of the shop on the left: Starting today, white roses and baby's breath are free.
Her voice bounced twice in the narrow alley—once off the rolling shutter of the left-side shop, once off the utility pole at the mouth of the alley.
The owner on the left didn't move. She just nudged her bucket of calla lilies half an inch inward. The bottom of the bucket scraped against the stone slab with a short friction sound.
The owner on the right said her second line: Phalaenopsis orchids are also free, with the original pot included.
"The moment the word free was shouted from the right, the shop on the left was already losing."
I watched the baby's breath debris clinging to the right-side owner's apron. "Not because free stole the customers. Because of the word free itself. It made every single flower in that left-side shop into a loss. She can't match free. If she matches it, she doesn't survive. If she doesn't match it, she can only watch her flowers get twisted off."
"So what she's twisting isn't the flowers." Dianzi stood beside me.
"She's twisting the part of herself she still believes in."
The owner on the left leaned against her doorframe, looking down at the bucket of bare flower stems.
That tulip petal she had twisted loose from the bucket rim was blown twice by the wind. It didn't fall. The wind lifted it and set it back down, each time in the same spot.
A pack of wild kids burst out from the street corner, chasing and roughhousing. Their footsteps bounced back and forth in the narrow alley.
The boy at the front, hair cropped in a buzz cut, his school uniform zipper hanging open, tripped over the empty bucket on the ground as he charged past the flower shop door.
He looked back, grinned, reached into the free bucket at the right-side shop, pulled out three white roses, and tossed them into the air.
The white roses scattered in the air, their petals blown off course by the wind. One petal drifted into the bucket on the left, landing among the bare stems.
The rest of the kids swarmed forward—grabbing flowers, throwing flowers, sticking flowers in each other's hair.
The baby's breath was yanked from the bucket. The sound of stems snapping crackled in fine, broken bursts.
Shredded petals littered the ground, crushed into mud under the children's soles.
A girl grabbed an armful of calla lilies from the doorway of the left-side shop and ran.
The left-side owner reached out to stop her. Her fingers brushed the edge of a petal. She caught nothing. The girl ran far away, the white spathes of the calla lilies swaying twice in the wind.
The right-side owner stood in her own doorway, looking at the trampled baby's breath and the half-emptied bucket. The marker slipped from her hand, dropped to the ground, and rolled into the wall-crack between the two shops.
The pen caught for a moment in the crack, then fell through, making an extremely soft impact sound.
The left-side owner slowly crouched down. She pulled out a tulip and a ranunculus from her own bucket and laid them across her knees. Then she pulled out a calla lily.
She pressed the stems of the three flowers together. With her right hand, she twisted the flower heads off, one by one. After each twist, her fingers paused for a beat.
The petals dropped beside her feet, mingling with the trampled baby's breath debris. One petal landed on the top of her shoe. She didn't brush it off.
She stood up, stuck the three bare stems in her hand back into the bucket. Water seeped from the broken ends of the stems and dripped onto the price tag, blurring the number over a hundred into a smeared blot.
——What she twisted off wasn't the stems. It was the last afternoon she still believed in.
She turned, carried out a cardboard sign from inside the shop, and set it in front of the bucket. The sign read For Sale.
On the wall beside the doorframe, her old label was still stuck there, held on by clear tape. The edges were already curling with fuzz. The characters on the label had been faded by the sun, only a few strokes still barely legible.
The For Sale cardboard sign in front of the left-side shop swayed gently in the wind.
From inside the shop on the right, the sound of a radio drifted out, broadcasting the weather forecast. It said there would be showers later in the evening.
The left-side owner lifted her head and looked at the sky. The clouds were indeed piling in this direction.
She flipped the For Sale sign over, wrote For Sale on the back with her marker, flipped it back, and set the sign in place again.
Then she walked into her shop, closed the glass door, and began carrying the flower buckets against the wall inside, one by one.
After the glass door closed, she stood behind it for a few seconds, her hand still resting on the handle. The right-side owner was still wiping down the counter. That water stain on her apron had already dried.
We stood where we were and watched that water stain slowly dry.
"Free is the most expensive price. What it costs isn't money. It's the person next to you."
I slipped my hands into my pockets. "The shop on the right used free to take all the customers from the left. Then it found out that free doesn't attract customers. It attracts wild kids. The shop on the left twisted off its flowers. The For Sale sign is sitting in front of the bucket. What's for sale isn't the shop. It's themselves."
Dianzi leaned against me. "Will both sides come find us?"
"No. The one on the left has already written out everything she had to say on that For Sale sign. The one on the right still believes free is winning. The ones who will truly come find us are the people standing on the side, watching."
The right-side owner also went back into her shop. The glass door stayed open. Her apron was flecked with crushed white rose leaves.
She wiped her hand on her apron, leaving a dark water stain. She walked behind the counter and turned the radio volume down a little.
The weather announcer's voice became a low hum.
The rolling shutter of the left-side flower shop was pulled halfway down, revealing the neatly arranged flower buckets behind the door, the water inside them still rippling gently.
The For Sale sign rested in front of the bucket, swaying slightly in the draft leaking through the door crack.
The characters pressing through from the back of the sign were faintly legible under the streetlamp. Those two characters were larger than the ones on the front, their strokes dragging longer.