A man came to town one day, a sleepy little village. The women ran the shops in these times. Every shop a fashion store and each cordially sold something different from the other as to avoid impolite competition. When one made a newly patterned skirt, the others may copy its shape but only its shape—politely. The men had all gone home, and stayed. Busying themselves with grooming and coiffured accoutrement. They did not know each other, even the captive in the home next door. They might wave and nod —while walking the dog for instance, but connection was a fearful thing, for connection meant disclosure and disclosure meant an exposition of lost pride and lack of confidence. Even at the exchange of a nod fear would widen each man’s eyes and that too was too much an admission for him. Of what could they speak? Their women’s’ latest patterns? Their haircuts? Their petitions for a back yard project? A man came to town one day. He carried a new pattern in his shoulder bag. As he made his way from shop to shop, impressing the women and tempting them with his wares, the women began to have an abnormal response. You see, they would normally wish for their shop to be visited first by traveling pattern salesmen, clamoring to stake a claim so that all the other shop owners could at best reproduce facsímiles. Advantage in being first. This response was stronger. The impulse greater. When the salesman showed each woman this pattern, his finest, they would go weak at its beauty. It compelled them, this newness, its superiority of shapeliness, its curvatures meant something like superiority itself. “Wear my pattern” he said “and you’ll never want another, and time will stop too, and you’ll never be hungry again, and your men will disappear if they ever rise up against you in anger—those devils and their buried strengths.” “I must have it!” they would yell. And they suddenly forgot their matronly kindness for their neighbors. The salesman stirred their hearts with hunger and fear, and so they began sharing his pattern but not out of courtesy, but in demand: “keep your scary men at home and cure our collective hunger—we demand this!” The man sold this pattern more than any before it. Once he had sold out, he left the town and roamed to its neighbor. When the women came home, they looked at their men queerly and out of only one eye—even that eye was squinted. They spoke nothing of their patterned madness, nothing of the salesman, nothing of their secret power. For years hence men knew nothing of this secret pattern. The women forgot eventually, all their pattern businesses. They each wore the salesman’s intoxicating garb. They still went to work. But they sold only the sacred pattern. They knew not why. After their daughters and their daughters’ daughters inherited these shops, the question was never once posed “why mother, do we sell only this pattern? Why not others?” The question simply never made its way into their minds and through to their lips past chattered teeth. One day, a man walking her dogs tangled them with another man walking her dogs. Now several dogs were tangled and these men could not silently solve this kerfuffle; thus one man walking her dogs spoke: Fellow man! We must coordinate. It was a word he’d forgotten, and besides; her dogs were nearly untangled. On went the monotony that turned time into nothing. Years went by and verily dogs would tangle from time to time. A non occurrence would lead to an occurrence. Menial work never draws ire nor even attention. Years still. The pattern man needed visit just once to set events in order and thereby happenstance and disorder and conversations with their ideas and fearful temptations between strange men, strangers to each other but brothers in time. And daughters? They too grew curious. Curiosity is rebellion’s precedent and future’s seed. The question mark marks time itself in an otherwise timeless world. Men at bay and girls in line for inheritance, the pre-axial world spun and spun. Sunflowers bloomed in permanence and they all ignored the tilling of the soil. Old stories of the pattern salesman were exchanged behind old ladies changing rooms. Hushed tones and memories dared not themselves out through swinging saloon doors, but a story; that is the turning; that is the tilling; that is the divine spark of dreaded change and the bait of youth and tiredness and rebellion and above all: the shapely intrigue in the curve of the questions mark. “Why mother, do we sell only this pattern?” A gasp that spun the world flat! A man walking her dog, tangled in leashes and rebellion! And just then, as young as the day he’d last strolled their sleep streets the pattern salesman came to town. He carried a new pattern in his shoulder bag. An old woman came from her shop into the street, stopped him, and asked; sir, sir, we’re glad you’ve come once again. Our pattern has been broken. We’ve grown tired with it’s spell. Please, before we discuss our business, would you give us your name so we might pass it on —in hushed tones of course— to our daughters for future’s sake? The man whispered two things to the old woman. “Dear, as you know I am a pattern salesman. In my patterns there is no future, only present. As for my name: it is More.”