Off Assignment
Off Assignment, Letter to a Stranger: “To the Shopkeeper in Fez”
Letter to a Stranger
Lavinia Spalding
I wasn’t looking for you when I entered Place Seffarine. I was only listening to the call-and-response between chickens clucking and coppersmiths hammering. But I stopped when I recognized the miniature brass animals on the table outside your shop. I had been here a year and a half ago and bought five of these animals for my two-year-old son, Ellis, tucking them in the bottom of his stroller so he wouldn’t put them in his mouth and choke.
But I mostly remembered your shop because my husband had spent twenty minutes inside it while I’d browsed nearby. He’d emerged looking sheepish. “I need to find an ATM,” he said. “I might have made some rash decisions.”
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