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join the forces of the working world. I take my time cutting through the circle. It’s a few minutes after ten by the time I finally reach my store and lift open the metal grate that covers the front door. There’s a morning ritual that comes with opening a store. I lift the metal grates, and then tug down the white plastic blinds that block out all light until they spring back up. I turn on the lights and wait for their mechanical hum to fill the room. I make a general assessment. Shelves, windows, cash register are all in place. The ceiling remains, the tiles on the floor have held. Everything is precisely as it should be. Even now, after all these years, this continues to amaze me. It seems as if time stands completely still at the close of each day, and is resumed only by my return. Sometimes I like to think that if I waited ten or twenty years before opening my store, I could return to find it completely unchanged.
    Today I swing the front door wide open and let the wind make a mess of the papers still sitting on the counter. It’s May 3, and purchase orders still unfulfilled from the previous month are piled a few inches high, along with a stack of receipts and bills that I can’t afford to pay. It will rain today. You can smell it in the air, a midmorning spring shower that will last at least into the afternoon.
    I gather the dust from the four corners of the store and usher it out the door. It erupts into a brief plume that’s dissolved by the wind as soon as it hits the open air. The morning is quiet. The rain comes and fills the gutters and makes a puddle out of the patch of grass next to my store. Women trickle in, armed with their first-of-the-month government subsidy checks. They shop in small quantities: a few individual rolls of toilet paper; small bags of diapers; and can after can of processed soup. Until recently, most of my customers were teenagers on their way home from school, and on Friday and Saturday nights, single men browsing through the aisles of prostitutes who surrounded the circle after dark. The teenagers bought the chips and candy; the men bought the condoms behind the counter. More often than not, both opened them right after leaving the store, leaving a trail of candy wrappers and condom boxes on the sidewalk out front. A social worker who used to come through the neighborhood on the weekends told me the men did that to save time, and that if I ever stepped into the alley behind the store, I could see them putting the condoms on. She always bought a dozen candy bars for the women when she came in. They needed it, she said, to keep up their blood-sugar level.
    Most of the women who worked on the circle also came to my store at one point or another. Those who came regularly flirted and shoplifted a bag of chips or a can of soda, knowing all along that I could see them but didn’t care. They had names like Chocolate and Velvet, always things that you could touch or taste because the imagination is nothing if not tactile. On summer nights, traffic backed up for blocks leading into and out of the circle as a uniquely democratic blend of cars—Mercedes, Volvos, rusted Plymouths, and boxcar Chevys—lined up to choose from the women who ringed the circle in their bright neon outfits like a cheap, tawdry crown. If I stayed open late on the weekends back then, I could make as much in one night as I do in one week now. The men buying the diapers, ice cream, and tampons they had supposedly left home for, and the women, newly minted but still with only enough money to buy another can of soda to keep them awake, all came together for just enough hours every week to make me a living that I no longer judged as honest or decent, but accepted as a matter of standard fact somewhere in between yes, we all must die, and the sun is ninety-three million miles away.
    There are hardly any women left on the circle now. They have vanished not into thin air, but into a different space or reality, as if they had