Between the letters
A sign shop at closing time, and the one customer who came to stand inside the words.
- Where
- A neon workshop, Lisbon
- When
- What lit it
- New signs, switched on once
- Reading
- 1 minute
The shop bends glass tubes into words for bars that have not opened yet. At the end of the day the finished ones hang from the ceiling and are switched on once, to see if they hold.
It takes a day to bend a word. The glass is heated over a ribbon of flame until it sags, then turned by hand against a drawing on the bench, backwards, because the letters are read from the other side.
She comes by on those evenings and stands between them. Half a word on one side, half of another on the other, none of it meant for her.
A sign is only finished when someone has stood in its light and not read it.
The owner lets her. He says she is the test the gas cannot do.
Tonight there were three: the name of a café, the word open in a script nobody will be able to read from the street, and a heart for a bar that has not decided what it is called.
She stood under the heart for longest. Then the switch went off, the tubes ticked as they cooled, and she said goodnight to the room as if there were someone else in it.
Photo: Pexels
