A Sign

Time will be mine if I hold onto it long enough. Appreciate. Appreciate what you have. But will there ever be a sign that my time has arrived?

These were the kinds of thoughts that swirled through the mind of Sara Levita as she pressed her forehead against the full-length window of the fish store known as Walt’s. Whenever she walked down Harvard Street, she always stopped to gaze at the fish in the window. These fish look content, she mused. And why not?  They were scraped and scrubbed and luxuriously displayed. Even the ice crystals upon which they lay their briny fins sparkled like tiny jewels. 

But it wasn’t just the fish that drew Sara to the shop window. Walt’s seemed more real to her than any other place in Brookline, or all of Boston for that matter. Part of it was that she loved to watch the antics of the boisterous men who worked there. They didn’t seem to mind that their fingers were mired in fish-flesh and their aprons were spattered with fish-blood. And this for ten hours every day of the week.  They were always in good humor. Even their shouting and cursing–a particular spicy brew–was done in jest. They even burst into song once in a while, and if you were lucky enough to catch it, you would hear bits of opera mixed with raunchy plays on fish that would make your earlobes burn.

 Sara would often enter the store and buy two pieces of fish–one for herself and the other one to conceal the fact that she lived...