The shutter was down.
Not half down. Not “back in five minutes” down. All the way, a sheet of corrugated metal painted the faded green of an old postbox, locked at the bottom with a padlock the size of my fist.
I had promised myself I’d come back for this shop. A window of olive jars, dusty sardine tins stacked like bricks, a hand-lettered sign I couldn’t fully read. I had waved it off this morning with a breezy internal monologue: Plenty of time. See the cathedral first. Come back full.
Now I was back. And the street looked like a film set between takes.
I tried the bakery next door and knocked twice.
Nothing.
The shoe repair shop. Dark. I pressed my face to the glass.
“Hello?”
A fly buzzed past my ear. That was the only answer.
I moved to the stationery shop and tried the handle. Locked. I looked up and down the street. Same blue tiles on the corner. Same crooked balcony with the red geraniums. I was definitely on the right street. The street had just, somehow, stopped existing.
I’ll admit it, I thought of Chihiro from Spirited Away, stepping into that strangely emptied town where everything should be open and nobody is home. I looked at my hands. Still solid. Still sweaty.
A door creaked across the street. An older man stepped out with a paper bag of bread tucked under his arm like a newspaper, sleeves rolled exactly twice. He looked at me the way you look at a pigeon that has wandered into a kitchen. Curious. Patient.
“Hola,” I said, already gesturing at the shutter. “Cerrado?”
“Sí, sí.” He nodded, unsurprised.
“But why? All of them?”
He didn’t have enough English for the full explanation and I didn’t have enough Spanish. So we improvised. He tapped his wrist where a watch would be.
“Qué hora?” I tried.
He held up five fingers.
“A las cinco.”
“Five o’clock?” I blinked.
He mimed lifting a fork to his mouth, chewed an imaginary mouthful, and raised his eyebrows as if that explained everything. Which, honestly, it did.
“Lunch,” I said.
“Sí.”
“A long lunch” I replied
He tipped his head to one side. “Sí. Claro.”
He pointed at his own door, then at the bread under his arm, then at his chest. My lunch. My house. My time.
“Right,” I said. “Of course.”
He seemed to catch the sheepishness in my voice. He smiled and patted the bread like it was a small, reliable pet. Then he walked off down the empty street without looking back.
I found a bench in a thin stripe of shade and sat down.
Above me, someone on the crooked balcony was clearing plates. A fork scraped. A woman said something and laughed, a full, unhurried laugh, like she had nowhere else to be.
I had walked in carrying my own clock, fully expecting the street to set itself to it. When it didn’t, my first thought was: something is wrong. I didn’t thought that something is different.
The green shutter stayed closed. Behind it, someone was probably sitting down to a meal, pouring a glass of something cold, not thinking about me at all.
Good for them, honestly.
I leaned back on the bench. The air smelled of warm stone and someone’s window box of herbs. Not a bad place to wait.
At a quarter past five, the padlock clicked open.
I was already there.