Stall 7

The municipal letter is identical in both envelopes, down to the smudged stamp: Stall 7, Harbor Market, granted for the season. The problem is that there is one Stall 7 and two envelopes. Defne gets there first, at 4:50 a.m., and bolts her grandmother's copper saç to the counter like a flag on a summit. Emir arrives at 4:55 with two hundred skewers, reads the situation, and begins, with infuriating calm, setting up his grill on the other half of the counter as if sharing had been the plan all along. "This is my stall," says Defne. "It really isn't," says Emir, lighting the coals. The market inspector, a man who has been shouted at by professionals, looks at both letters, declares the matter "administratively complicated," and leaves on what he calls an urgent inspection of somewhere else. So they share it, the way two armies share a border. Her gözleme on the left, his köfte on the right. Separate cash boxes. A strip of masking tape down the middle of the counter, which both of them cross roughly nine hundred times a day, reaching for salt, for change, for the good knife — until the morning the tape mysteriously disappears, and neither of them mentions it, and neither of them puts it back.