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cluttered with china bowls filled with beaded bracelets and more incense, pentacle charms, stones with special powers. Jars of rose petals and salts, ceramic Buddhas garlanded with jade, bundles of sage.
    I used to be in love with the girl who worked at the witch store when I was a kid. She was elfin but not at all frail, and piled her crow-colored hair on top of her head in complicated knots. Her arms were inky with tattoos, sigils and runes and old woodcut illustrations running from her shoulders to her wrists. She always wore black: black lace dresses cut short and ragged, faded black concert shirts peppered with holes and tight black jeans, black boots or black canvas sneakers. Silver rings on every finger and silver pendants on silver chains.
    When Aurora and I were young it was our greatest ambition to someday be the witch-store girl. We spent whole afternoons poking among the boxes of incenses, sneaking glances at her and imagining her life: her apartment filled with altars and candles and tapestries, her bed strewn with crushed-velvet pillows and bits of herbs, her collection of Dead Can Dance and Siouxsie and Clan of Xymox and This Mortal Coil on vinyl. Probably her boyfriend was one of the other people who worked in the market, one of the fruit-stand boys, equally cool-eyed and mysterious and beautiful. When we bought our vanilla oil and Nag Champa the witch-store girl would ignore us until the last possible minute, ignore even radiant, otherworldly Aurora; she would look out the window with one finger holding her place in her book, which was always a book of spells. I’d stand there twisting one foot behind the other, wanting to ask her if it was possible to move into her life, or even what that life looked like, what she did after work, what she thought about, who she loved, could she tell our fortunes from the pack of tarot cards she kept in her bag with her pot and her clove cigarettes.
    These days the witch-store girl is a different girl. I do work in the market, and that life has lost some of its luster now that I’m the one hauling compost after the fruit stand closes, or bantering with the fish-stall boys who love to flirt with everyone, or half freezing to death on the long winter afternoons. Aurora still meets me after work sometimes, though, and we go to the witch store and rummage through books about Wicca and handfasting, or uncap the brown bottles of essential oil and hold them up to each other’s noses. The witch-store girl still ignores us.
    Summer in the market is hell. Summer is so many tourists you have to kick at them to get anywhere; they gape at everything, take pictures of themselves wearing stupid hats or holding up cups of coffee, like coffee is something they can’t get where they are from. They ask you directions to places you’ve never heard of, or where they should eat dinner, or where they should stay, or if their car will be okay where they left it, while their sticky-faced children knock apples off the displays and wail in hellish chorus. In the summers I work full-time, and sometimes by the end of the day I never want to see another human being again.
    Today has been a long day full of tourists palming peaches in their meaty hands, and I’m tired. I’m working with Raoul, who is my favorite. He’s a poet and he’s even meaner than me. He makes fun of the tourists to their faces and they love it, not realizing he’s serious. He lives in a studio apartment down the street from the market, and after work he lets me come over and smoke pot out of his hookah and fall asleep on his couch with his cat. His cat is named Oscar Wilde and its fur is the color and softness of dandelions gone to seed. Behind me I can hear the fish-stall boys yelling and chanting. The tourists cheer as they hurl fish back and forth.
    “The peaches here come highly recommended,” someone says. I look up, ready to make a smart-aleck remark, and it’s Jack. I want to reach across the fruit and touch him,