A stylized portrait of a tiny, old woman with white hair in a red coat, sitting at a table with an hourglass.

a tiny woman in a velvet red coat, sitting behind a folding table wedged between two boarded-up storefronts. She looked like she’d always been there. Her coat had once been elegant—sun-faded now, threadbare at the seams. Her hair was piled in a loose, silvery knot atop her head, held together by a yellow pencil. Around her neck hung an hourglass no bigger than a thimble, and the sand inside it ran upward. Her face was difficult to place. The kind that could be sixty or six hundred. Her dark eyes held flecks of gold, like old Persian carpets worn soft by centuries of footsteps. Not exactly kind, but patient—the stone is patient. Like she’d seen every kind of sorrow pass beneath the sun, and had long since stopped being surprised. See more