The stalls were closing.
Vendors folded their canvases and stacked their crates, moving slowly, as if they've done this a thousand times and had time for a thousand more. A woman near the bridge was handing out the last of her spiced fruit to a cluster of children who received each piece like a treasure, their small hands closing around the offerings with a reverence that the fruit probably didn't deserve but that the hour and the occasion made appropriate. A man swept his section of platform with a broom made of bound twigs, pushing the debris of celebration toward the edge where it would fall into the forest below and become part of the soil that fed the trees that held the city that had just finished celebrating.
I walked beside Raizen.
