The Sundial Shift

Tina was twenty-seven and had never once been inside the locomotive wash shed behind the dock. She'd run inventory for the ship chandler for four years, past that shed maybe a thousand times, and it had always just been a gray box with a rusted door. Tonight it had a potluck in front of it.

Well, technically the potluck was for the sailboat. The old restored ketch sat in its slip looking very pleased with itself, all fresh varnish and new canvas, and forty adults over twenty-one stood around it eating casserole off folding tables. Clarence, the retired harbor master who'd led the restoration, was giving his third speech of the evening. Hanna, the marine surveyor, was quietly moving the potato salad out of the sun for the second time.

Tina filled her plate and looked for the least crowded spot. That turned out to be the end of the table, next to a guy she didn't know. Tall. Dark hair. Paint on his forearms, which meant restoration crew.

"Hi," he said. "Ahmed. Landscaping. I did the beds around the dock office."

"Tina. Inventory runner for the chandler. I did none of the beds."

He laughed. Good start.

They ate in a friendly silence for a minute. Then Tina noticed what was sitting on the barrel next to them. A walnut sundial, round as a dinner plate, with a polished brass triangle sticking up out of the middle.

"That's a weird raffle prize," she said.

"That's Clarence's baby," Ahmed said. "He found it in a flea market in Vitória six years ago. Carried it home on his lap on the bus like a cat. It's supposed to be 'thematically appropriate' for the boat."

"It's a sundial. For a boat."

"He's a harbor master. Retired," Ahmed added, as if that explained anything. It kind of did.

Tina studied it. The brass gnomon threw a thin shadow across the walnut face, even here in the evening light. Somebody had engraved little stars around the edge. It was, she had to admit, a nice object. The kind of thing a man who lived alone on a trawler would love more than most people.

"Can I borrow you two for a moment?" Clarence appeared at their elbows, forty-five years old and radiating purpose. "The raffle table's short one centerpiece and the sundial is sitting all the way over here doing nothing. Would you carry it over? Two hands, please, it's heavier than it looks and it is older than both of you combined."

"It's not that heavy," Ahmed said.

"It's heavier than it looks," Clarence repeated, and walked off to greet someone else.

So Tina and Ahmed each took a side of the barrel-top and lifted the sundial off together. It was heavier than it looked. Walnut, solid, with an iron ring underneath where somebody had once bolted it to a wall.

"Shortcut's through the wash shed," Ahmed said, nodding at the gray building behind the tables. "Saves us walking all the way around the fuel shed with this thing."

"Never been in there," Tina said.

"Nobody has. It's Clarence's hoard room."

They carried it around the side, ducked through the door Clarence had left propped open with a bucket, and there it was. The old locomotive wash shed. Concrete floor, sloped, with iron drain grates set into it in two long rows. Water stains decades old. A high row of little windows letting in the last of the daylight. Smelled like wet stone and old machine oil.

They set the sundial down on a low concrete shelf, careful with the brass.

And that was when Ahmed picked up an old rag off a hook, mostly out of habit, and wiped a smear of dust off the sundial's face. Tina watched him do it and, for no reason her brain has ever satisfactorily explained, said:

"You know what this floor looks like? It looks like a floor people would hook up on."

The words were out before quality control could weigh in.

Ahmed stopped wiping. "What?"

"I mean." She gestured at the grates, the stains, the dim light. "Cold concrete. Drain grates. No cameras. It's got a whole mood. Somebody at some point in the last eighty years definitely got railed on that grate."

There was a pause. A real one. Tina felt her ears go hot.

"Okay, honest answer?" Ahmed set the rag down. "I've actually thought about that. Not here specifically. But places like this. No frills. No, like, candles and a playlist. Just." He waved a hand at the general concrete-ness of the room. "Against something. On something. Quick and kind of rough and nobody performing anything."

Tina looked at him. He looked at her.

"You too?" he said.

"Since I was twenty-three," she said. "There was a dockworker I used to see on my runs. Never talked to him once. Three months of watching him throw lines around and thinking about exactly this kind of floor." She shrugged, trying to make it a small thing, which it was not. "Never did anything about it."

"Why not?"

"Because you can't tell a coworker you want to be bent over a winch, Ahmed. There are rules."

"Fair." He laughed, but it came out low. "Yeah. My last actual date was two years ago. Florist. She moved away. It was very polite sex in a very polite bed and I kept thinking, this is fine, this is nice, and none of it was what I actually..." He trailed off and rubbed his thumb along the edge of the sundial. "Anyway."

"Anyway," Tina agreed.

They stood there. The light through the little windows went from gold to gray. Somewhere outside, Clarence was probably starting speech number four.

Here is the thing about two adults standing in a cold shed after admitting a thing like that. The silence gets physical. It has weight. Tina could feel it pressing on her collarbones. She was aware of the drain grates. She was aware of the fact that Ahmed had paint on one forearm and hands that looked like they did actual work. She was twenty-seven years old and had never had sex with anyone, ever, which was a fact she did not plan to mention, and also a fact that was currently screaming at the back of her skull.

Ahmed was twenty-eight and thinking that this woman had just said the exact sentence that lived in the back of his head, and that she was standing four