The night before

The market is loudest just before it closes, as if it wants to get everything out before the shutters come down. Her sister has her by the wrist, pulling her past a stall spitting oil and sugar into the dark, and she doesn't resist, lets herself be pulled, because tomorrow there won't be time for this.

Somewhere behind them a man is calling out prices for something neither of them wants, and it doesn't matter, the calling is just part of the noise now, folded into the clang of a shutter half-down, the bark of a dog that belongs to no one and everyone.

Her sister buys two of the same fried thing without asking what she wants, presses one into her hand still too hot to hold properly, and they eat walking, not stopping, sugar catching in the corner of her mouth. Tomorrow there will be a hundred other hands on her — pulling a sleeve straight, testing whether an anklet sits right, murmuring instructions she has already heard nine times. Tonight there is just this hand, her sister's, sticky now too, gripping hers like she isn't ready to let go of the part of this that's only theirs.

Neither of them says anything about tomorrow. There's nothing to say that the walking doesn't already say better.

A bell rings somewhere close, brass and small, tied to a cart being wheeled home for the night, and under it, further off, someone is singing along badly to a radio only they can hear. Her sister laughs at the wrong note, doesn't bother covering her mouth, and reaches over to wipe the sugar from the corner of her mouth with her thumb, quick, unthinking, the way she has for as long as either of them remembers.

The last shutter comes down two stalls over with a metal clatter that hangs in the air a moment before the market goes quiet around them.