A market day winding down is a sad thing: after the screaming clatter and brightly-colored, chicken-squawking rush of the day, the dusk closes in on the dust and empty cages and disheveled stalls; the smells of spice and humanity are replaced by the dung of cart-pulling animals and the stink of slaughtered poultry.
In the general mess, Spokelse is a beacon. Gleaming white in the slanting light, she is a strange contrast with the mud-caked, slat-sided donkey that pulls Petra's rotting cart, overflowing with goods and with a line of goats strung behind it. An ugly freckled dog pants in the shade between its wheels, and sitting on the sides of the cart is Petra herself.
Sun-brown and freckled, she had made some attempt to wrangle her dark hair into a braid, through which is laced a bit of ribbon that looks expensive and, to judge from its pristine condition among the wreck that is her shabby costume, much-prized. She has one hand on Spokelse's neck, almost possessively; the other is carefully excavating a rearward tooth. Her mouth is stained brown with tobacco; there is an impressive patch of spit, accumulated throughout the day, near her swinging blackened feet.
She squints across the square, through the crowds dispersing, towards the massive man at the flower cart with his strange dark face and heavy coat despite the heat, as he places a rose gently into a woman's white hair. And she waits, as she always does, for something interesting to happen.
