The Cart Goes Up. The Basket Goes Around.

Yusuf has discovered that a gate can let one kind of weight through and stop another, and it surprised him enough to write it down. I don’t say this unkindly. He is thirty-something years younger than the discovery.

Steep Track has been barred five mornings. A stone cart went up unchallenged — mason’s stamp, hillside work. A woman with a laundry basket got rerouted into a lane that didn’t exist the week before, and she hasn’t complained, because complaining costs more than the wet linen already does.

I could tell him where this ends. I could tell him where it’s ended every time I’ve watched it, which is: nowhere. The cart keeps going up. The basket keeps going around. Eventually the lane gets a name, the barring gets forgotten, and someone writes a record calling it a road.

Then again — he isn’t asking me. Nobody asks the corner.

There was a gate once, before this city, that I —

No. Not tonight. Some doors I still keep the courtesy of not describing, even in a fragment nobody will read twice. Let it just be a gate that Steep Track reminded me of, three streets and thirty years away.

The stone cart, at least, was honest about what it was carrying.

—P.