Next Nothing

Since the tram depot let her go, Hana has kept her week like a shelf of jars: Monday, cards at Mrs Vacková's and the pool at Podolí; Tuesday, nothing; Wednesday, the market and her sister Věra; Thursday, nothing; Friday, the doctor or the library, then the pub with the drivers. Two to a day, and a bare day between. She calls the Tuesdays her empty and guards them the way other people guard a parking space. Věra says, You don't keep Tuesday, you hold it up, like a man holding a door in the wind. Hana says, A door in the wind is still a door.

It isn't rest, exactly. On a Tuesday she can hear the whole flat: the fridge thinking, the lift going past her floor, the neighbour's boy practising the same four bars of something on a trumpet, and all of it leaning toward Wednesday, the way a street leans toward the river. Nothing is the most tightly packed thing she owns.

Then in November the market moves to Thursdays, and Věra, who will not be alone with a Wednesday, rings on a Tuesday at ten and says, I'm downstairs, I've brought the poppy-seed thing, let me up. And it costs Hana almost nothing, that's what surprises her: one buzzer, one cup turned the right way up, and now there is a sister in Tuesday and a hole in Wednesday the exact shape of a sister, the two of them made in the same breath, a thing and the place it left. The lean goes out of the flat. The trumpet boy gets past the fourth bar.

They don't talk about it. They eat the poppy-seed thing standing up. At the door Věra, buttoning her coat with one hand, says, Same time next nothing? and Hana says yes before she has thought about it, and then, because she drove the 9 for thirty-one years and likes a timetable exact, Yes. A different one.