Short story · 4 min read · Set in Dyer Street ·
The Pawnbroker of Yesterdays
A pawn shop on Dyer Street takes yesterday as collateral, ticketing hours, promises and memories like clockwork, redeemable only by the person who pledged them.
Gower's was the last shop on Dyer Street with a bay window, the panes a little soured by decades of rain, and in the window, among the stopped watches and the odd violin, stood a row of small brass tags on hooks, each numbered, each blank. People who noticed the tags thought: ticketing machine, bus depot, war surplus. People who came in and asked learned better within the minute.
Gower the elder took yesterdays. Not antiques and not stories — yesterdays, actual, in the way a watch is an actual thing and not merely a theory of time. You could pawn yesterday if you had one worth having, and he would hold it against a sum written on a green ticket, and if you came back inside the term with the money, you had yesterday back whole and unmarked, even the bad parts, even the rain. The window tags were the empty ones. When he took something in, he wrote the number on in ink.
Everything in the shop was pledged. He sold nothing. That was the first thing he said to every new customer, before hello: *We don't sell. We hold.* The clock in the window, stopped at eleven past three, belonged to a woman on Vine Street who had brought in the hour her husband walked out — not the watch her husband left, but the hour itself, which she said had sat in the hall ever since like a coat on a hook. She could borrow it back hourly, that hour, if she wanted to feel it happen again; Gower advised her against it, and she had never once taken the loan.
There were rules, of course, because unsecured trade ruins everyone, and Gower the elder had them stitched inside his cuff the way other men keep laundry marks.
*Only the pledger redeems,* read the first. You could not buy back your neighbour's yesterday for him, however willing, and the attempts to do so filled two ledgers — sons redeeming fathers' yesterdays, wives redeeming husbands', and every such ticket, on presentation, went blank in Gower's hand, the ink lifting off like steam.
*Yesterday pawns at the interest it cost you,* read the second, and nobody ever understood it until he explained: the value of a day is set by what carrying it had been doing to you. An hour of 1954 that you thought about every night pawned heavy. A Tuesday that had gone unnoticed pawned for almost nothing, and those were the tickets that were never redeemed, because people come back for the days that hurt, and forget the ones that went past.
*Come back before the term, and it is yours entire,* read the third, and the term was always marked in days, never in dates, and in forty years the discrepancy was never once asked about by anyone who came back in time to have it matter.
The pawn shop kept no many odd tickets, and the odd ones mattered most. There was a pledge of a promise — a pledge written, the label saying, *not the kept promise but the making of it, the exact minute of the making, still warm:* held under a number in the low eight-hundreds, redeemed the term after next by a man with his collar up who did not take his coat off. There was a ticketed memory of a station whistle that the owner had brought in because it played in her sleep, on the hour, though the last such station had been raised twenty years; heavy to pawn, that one, pawned at sleep-rate. And there was, lowest hook, ticket 811, a tag with no item, no sum and no date, stitched to its hook with grey thread, which Gower the elder pointed at exactly once a session, to each new customer, and about which he said only: *Yesterday itself. The whole of it. Redeemable by whoever first misses it.*
The heir to the shop, a niece with a steady hand, found among his papers, after the lung trouble, a fourth rule unstitched from the cuff and laid flat in the ring drawer.
*Held intact. Nothing given back, nothing got round — the day is the day.*
Under it, unnumbered, one line in his later hand: *Ticket 811 out on loan. Term unmarked. It never comes back and never leaves.*
The niece took the cuff rule and stitched it to her own cuff, as trained, and set her first day's trading at the proper desk, and left the lowest hook where it was, grey thread and all.
The window clock behind the tags was stopped at eleven past three, and the niece, on her first morning alone, twice found herself glancing at it, twice found it at eleven past three, and the second time she noticed something a customer on the street could not: the hour hand was wet, as if newly painted, drying.
The clock had stopped before her uncle was born.
Then whose yesterday was the eleven past three?