When I got to the shop, the first thing I noticed was that it was too crowded.

When Peter and I had come here for the first time, when he had introduced the first shopkeeper whom I believed to be higher than the other one, it had been in the evening. There hadn’t been many people buying and selling in the big store then.

Yet I had thought them many, I had thought I would be able to cope, having made the calculations in my head.

I scoffed at myself now, at my mundane brain.

Would I survive here? I found myself asking, taking in the bustling and shuffling of...