A brass hinge without a door is eighteen bits this week on Market Row. The same hinge, last month, from the bin at the Hearthstone Smithy, was two bits and came with a pin that fit. The Hearthweek Gift Board's new circular does not mention the smithy price. It lists the hinge as gift number fourteen of twenty-one, under the heading "Presents a Loved One Cannot Honorably Own Just Once."
The circular ran twelve pages and went out on pale green paper with the town seal in the corner. Mayor Pippin Pines signed the foreword in a hand smaller than the price column. He called the twenty-one objects a household sequence. Skyline Sprocket's casting yard holds the exclusive mold, printed large on the back page and left out of the mayor's paragraph.
Number one is a porcelain hen the size of a salt cellar, four bits, facing left. The card on the crate says she is listening for the others. Numbers two through thirteen are more hens and a fence no longer than a butter knife. None of them stand level. Each base is molded with a notch that takes the next base and will not sit flat on a plain table. A buyer with thirteen owns a crowd and no shelf that will take it.
Number fourteen is the hinge. It does not attach to a coop, a gate, or the little fence. The circular says it completes the approach to the home. Shopkeepers who asked Sprocket's clerk which door it fits were told the door is not in the sequence. The sequence, the clerk said, is the gift.
Dorrie Pell keeps the dry-goods counter at the west end of Market Row. She paid forty-two bits for a display set before she had sold a hen. The listing fee is separate. To appear on the board's map of kind counters, a shop remits one bit per recommended gift for each week of Hearthweek. That is twenty-one bits a week, sale or no sale. Pell paid the first week. Ponies were already walking in with the green paper folded to the map.
"They ask for the hinge like it's a favor I'm refusing," Pell said. "I have thirty-eight of them. Not one has a door."
She has sold four hens, at four bits each. The tray has not moved.
The tray is number twenty-one. It is cedar, shallow, with twenty-one oval dents and no liner, and Skyline Sprocket's price on it is sixty bits. The board wrote the card. It says a house that sets out fewer than twenty-one pieces has offered an incomplete kindness. The dents are cut for the hens and for the hinge. By that card, a buyer who stops at the first hen has begun an insult and still owes the look of the rest.
Edda Brunt runs the night ovens at the Hearthstone Smithy. The circular was in her pay packet, under the wage slip and on top of the deduction for tools. She bought the hen for her sister on the first evening. Four bits is a lunch. On the second evening the sister asked which way the hen was meant to look. Brunt went back. The second bird was six bits. The third was six and a half. The board's sheet is silent on the climb. Shops are passing on the yard invoice, which notes that later molds carry the weight of expectation.
"She thanked me for the hen," Brunt said. "She did not ask for a crowd. I've got three birds on the sill and the wage slip still in my apron."
Sprocket took questions in the yard office. He said the early pieces were priced as an invitation and the later pieces as a commitment.
"A single hen is a closed sale," Sprocket said. "Twenty-one is a relationship."
Maris Quen, who chairs the Gift Board, filed the circular with the town clerk as a seasonal notice, in the drawer with parade routes and the booth fees.
"The hen is an introduction," Quen said. "Curation is the whole sequence."
The listing coin, she added, protects the map. Forty-one counters paid it in the first week. The board's receipt book shows eight hundred sixty-one bits, beside a note that the green paper cost ninety to print. Pell worked her figure on the back of a crate lid. Sixteen bits from four hens. Twenty-one bits to be on the map. Forty bits wholesale for a tray still under the counter, the only flat space being the one where she wraps soap. Sprocket's statement comes due on the first. The balance on it is the tray, and no pony at her counter has asked to carry one home.
