Marketplace

There is a kind of presence that doesn't announce itself. You learn it the way you learn a smell - not all at once, but in crossings, in the way a person sits in a room, in how they listen when everyone else is talking. Kryvide had that. He was someone I knew the way you know a person you cross paths with now and then over a long stretch of time - not a neighbor, not someone I lived beside, but someone whose presence I'd learned to recognize the way you'd recognize a particular knock. When he was there, something in the air changed. Not loud. Not intrusive. Just a shift, the way light changes when a cloud passes, except the change was toward steadiness, toward something held.