Inventory of a Closing Shop

The bell above the door has lost its tongue. For forty years it argued with the wind; now it hangs like a comma the sentence forgot.

He counts the buttons in their wooden drawer, each one a small moon someone almost needed — the coat that was never finished, the cuff left open like a question at a wedding.

Dust learns the shape of everything it covers. The ledger keeps its careful, dwindling sums, the numbers thinning toward the margin's white the way a path forgets itself in snow.

Outside, the street rehearses other lives: a child's balloon, a siren's borrowed grief. He turns the sign. The afternoon goes amber, and the scissors, finally, lie down to rest.