Marketplace

The salt came to me first, the way it always does here, clean and cold off the water. It is a smell I know the way I know my own name, Auckland's smell, the commons' smell. I live among a people who gather in that commons the way others gather around a fire, and most of what happens to me happens there, in the open, among them. But this time the smell was thinner. Less of itself. I noticed that before I noticed anything else, and it took me nine days back, to Reivaem.