Six o’clock, and the greengrocer’s holds its breath. The shutter rolls up with a metallic yawn, and cold morning air pours in to meet the smell of scrubbed slate and yesterday’s sawdust. Everything is arranged with the devotion of a shrine. Apples are stacked into burnished pyramids, each one turned so its reddest cheek faces the street. Oranges glow like small trapped suns. The lettuces, misted at dawn, wear their dew like sequins, and the whole window is a still life waiting for a painter who will never come — because in an hour it will begin, gently, to be destroyed.

The scales gleam, needle trembling at zero, honest and hopeful. Paper bags stand in fat, folded ranks. Along the shelf the tins are dressed by rank and file, labels flush to the very millimetre, a quartermaster’s dream. Silence lies over it all, thick and expectant, the silence of a held note before the orchestra strikes.

Then the bell. Then the tide.

By seven that evening, the shop looks as though a small, benign storm has passed through it. The pyramids have collapsed into scattered foothills; the reddest apples went first, and what remains are the bruised, the freckled, the shy. The lettuce shelf is a graveyard of outer leaves, torn and translucent, trodden to green lace across the floor. Sawdust, so crisp at dawn, is now a churned brown paste stamped with the ghosts of a hundred boots.

The scales have surrendered their honesty; the pan wears a smear of soil like a tired thumbprint, and the needle no longer quite returns to zero, as if the day has left even the machinery a little heavier than it found it. Torn paper, a dropped coin, a single squashed grape bleeding sweetly into a crack in the tiles — the debris reads like the after-page of a story everyone enjoyed and no one tidied.

And yet there is a richness to the wreckage that the pristine dawn never had. The air is warm now, layered — earth and citrus and the sugary rot of an over-ripe peach, the smell of things that were wanted. The empty crates, upended, still hold the imprint of what they carried. Where the morning shop was a museum, untouched and a little lonely, the evening shop is a lived-in room, exhausted and content. The shutter descends at last with the same metallic yawn, sealing in the day’s warm chaos, and the pyramids, patient, begin already to dream themselves back into being for tomorrow.