Market Day

There's a market on days that end in three or six. The cloth is laid out before the sky is fully light.

Roll on roll, stack on stack, blue and white, spilling off the stalls and down half the street. From far off, as if someone had cut the sky to pieces in the night and laid it out to sell. Up close it separates — indigo, moon-white, greyed blue, and that near-black blue.

There are flowers in the cloth. Not drawn — tied. You pinch the cloth up, here and there, bind it tight, stitch it shut. In the dye, the open places drink the blue; the bound places keep it out, and stay white. You tie it, sink it in the vat, let it take, then pick the threads out, one stitch at a time.

Until you unpick it, no one knows how it has opened.

The woman selling cloth doesn't say much; her hands never stop folding, squaring. Can you tie the pattern you want, I asked. She thought about it. The hands know roughly where they're going, she said. But how the dye creeps, how deep, how much the cloth drinks — that's the vat's to say, not the person's. Same hands, same pattern, tie a hundred and you dye a hundred. No two the same.

A little off, and it's a little off.

One kerchief: an indigo ground, and one place where the white hadn't held — the blue had slipped in and bled a small bloom, like a moon on water scattered by wind. The thread there wasn't bound tight, she said. It wasn't meant to be like that.

It was the best piece on the stall.

The good things, I think, are all like this. Not made — happened upon. The hand can only lead it close; the rest you hand to the vat, to that little bit of chance no one controls. On a whole length of cloth, the one place the hand couldn't govern is the very place it parts from every other. There will never be a second moon bled open like that one. Tie it a thousand times and you won't tie it again.

The market breaks up fast. The sun climbs, the dew dries, the cloth is rolled and gathered, the street empties — only water-marks left on the stone, and soon those bake away too. As if nothing had happened.

On the way back I kept thinking about that kerchief. We spend so much wanting everything the same, everything right. And the thing that stopped me was the one place it went wrong.

No two are the same. And that's well.