The Reunion Carcass

The market square was gray when they pulled in. Five in the morning, and the sky a dull, dark gray. Lita parked the truck crooked and left it that way.

"Nobody's here to judge my parking," she said.

"Nobody's awake to judge anything," Micheal said. "That's the beauty of it."

They were twenty-nine and thirty-one respectively, married three years, and they had not slept. Their band, which had exactly one hit nine years ago and then dissolved into adult life, had played a reunion show the night before. Micheal's voice was a husk. Lita's ears still rang.

She was still in the stage outfit. Leather jacket over a black dress that had survived the whole set, which was more than she could say for her voice. Micheal wore the shirt with the torn cuff he refused to mend, because torn cuffs were authentic, he said, and audiences could smell authenticity.

Lita smelled like beer and stage smoke and, faintly, like the salt and vinegar crisps they'd split in the truck at two a.m.

The market was already half built. Vans backed up to stalls. Crates of vegetables landed on trestle tables with the confidence of men who had done it ten thousand times. A butcher unrolled his awning like he was opening a country. Somewhere a gull screamed about something.

"God, I love a market before the public shows up," Micheal said. "It's all promise. No one's haggling yet. Everything is still possible."

"You're sentimental because you're running on no sleep and four drinks from nine hours ago."

"I'm sentimental because we played a show and people sang the chorus back at us. That earns a man at least until sunrise of sentiment."

Lita laughed, which came out as a croak. She'd shouted the bridge of their one hit into a mic for ninety seconds straight and her throat had filed a formal objection. The market was in the town where she worked as a vet tech, two days a week at the clinic by the square, so she knew most of these faces. Micheal knew none of them, which made him dangerous.

They drifted down the row of stalls. A farmer was arranging apples with the seriousness of a jeweler. He had a beard you could lose a small dog in and forearms like bridge cable. Next to him, a woman was stacking cheese wheels and pretending not to watch the apples man, which was a whole situation Lita filed away for later.

And then the streetlight happened.

There was one lamp in the middle of the cobbled square, older than both of them. It flickered. Not steadily. It stuttered, caught, died, came back, like it was telling a joke and forgetting the punchline.

Micheal stopped under it. He looked up at it. He looked at Lita.

"Oh no," Lita said.

"Oh yes!"

"We are not doing dares. I'm twenty-nine. You're thirty-one. You have a mortgage."

"The light dares us," Micheal said. "Look at it. It's flickering. That's ancient law. That's older than either of us."

"It's a dying bulb."

"It's a covenant." He spread his arms under the lamp like a preacher. "First dare. You. Haggle that farmer into giving you a free peach. Not buying it cheap. Free. For nothing. Out of the goodness of his heart or the strength of your argument."

Lita looked at the farmer. He looked as though he had heard every argument ever constructed about the price of fruit and outlived them all.

"That's not a dare, that's a hostage situation," she said.

"Those are the terms."

"What do I get if I win?"

"The peach."

"And if I lose?"

"Unlimited dishwashing duty until the tour bus comes back, which it won't, so, forever."

Lita cracked her knuckles, which did nothing, and walked over.

"Morning," she said. Her voice came out like a gravel driveway. The farmer looked up.

"Morning, love. Nothing's ripe till Thursday, so don't start."

"I haven't started anything."

"You've got the look. Everyone with the look wants peaches."

"Actually," Lita said, "I want to know how you get a beard like that. Is it genetics? Is it a product? I ask because my husband has been growing one for a year and it looks like moss on a bad wall. Yours looks like it has its own pension."

The farmer stopped arranging apples.

"This?" He stroked it. "Six months. No product. Beef dripping, if anything."

"Beef dripping."

"Old way. My father did it. Conditions the hair."

"See, that's the difference. My husband conditions his with actual conditioner. It looks like a sad hedge. I keep telling him, you need a system. You're clearly a man with a system."

"I am a man with a system," the farmer agreed. He was now stroking the beard with both hands, which was a good sign.

"It'd be a shame," Lita said, glancing at the peaches, "if I had nothing to take home to show him as inspiration. Something ripe. Something that says, this is what happens when a man commits."

There was a pause. The farmer reached into the crate, picked a peach the color of a sunset that minded its own business, and handed it over.

"Don't tell the wife I'm giving stock away before six a.m.," he said.

"Your secret dies with me."

She walked back to the flickering lamp holding the peach up like a trophy. Micheal was applauding, slowly, with both hands.

"Beard?" he said.

"Beard."

"You told a man his beard was his pension."

"Men would die for that sentence and you know it." She took a bite of the peach standing right there in the square, and it was so good she had to close her eyes. "Your turn."

Micheal looked around, calm as anything, and pointed at a stall near the edge where crates were stacked and, from one of the crates, came a sound. A low, indignant, feathery sound.

"Is that a live chicken stall?" he said.

"That's Dafydd's. He sells hens. Point of order, what's the dare?"

"Buy a live hen. Carry it under your arm for five minutes. In the market. In that shirt."

"If it ruins the shirt..."

"The shirt already has a torn cuff, the shirt has made its peace with ruin."

Micheal walked over with the confidence of a man who had never held a bird. Lita followed at a distance that said, publicly, I don't know him.

Dafydd was sixty-ish, waterproof trousers, hands like tree roots. He listened to the request with the face of a man being told the weather was about to do something historical.

"Five minutes," he said. "Under the arm."

"Under the arm. Like a rugby ball."

"This one." Dafydd reached into the crate and pulled out a brown hen who looked personally offended at existing. "Her name is Bronwen. She's got opinions. Hold her wings down or she'll have yours."

Micheal took Bronwen. Tucked her under his arm. Bronwen immediately went rigid, then relaunched a protest campaign in low mutters.

"She loves me," Micheal said. "I can tell. Look at the eye contact."

"She's sizing up your throat," Lita said.

Dafydd laughed so hard he had to sit down on a crate. "Ten pounds if you keep her, mind."

"I'm not keeping her."

"Everyone says that. Last man said that now has four."

The five minutes were, honestly, magnificent. Micheal walked the length of the market with Bronwen under his arm and narrated her a tour. "And on your left, cheese. On your right, more cheese. This town loves cheese, Bronwen, it's one of its five pillars." Bronwen muttered along. The cheese woman watched them approach with growing alarm, because her stall was directly in the flight path of destiny.

Micheal returned Bronwen to Dafydd, paid nothing, shook the man's hand, and walked back under the flickering lamp with visible triumph and one white feather stuck to his sleeve.

"Five minutes," he said. "The hen respected me by the end. There was a moment. A trust moment."

"There was a moment she nearly went for your jugular, but fine." Lita finished the peach and wiped her mouth on her sleeve, because the dress was already past saving. "My turn to set terms."

The light stuttered overhead. Died. Came back.

"The lamp agrees," Micheal said.

"The lamp needs an electrician, is what the lamp needs." Lita looked down the row and found her target. The cheese woman. Wheel after wheel, a board