The price tag said twelve euros. She turned the rooster over and the paint on his tail was already lifting at one corner, a thin crescent of glaze curling away from the red like a bad sunburn. The man behind the stall was eating a pastel de nata and not watching her. She set the rooster down, picked him up again, set him down.
She wrapped the rooster in the hostel shirt - the gray one with the silkscreened tram - and nested him between the two cork coasters and the ginjinha bottle, the chocolate cup already leaving a faint brown ring on the map she'd folded wrong at the crease. The zipper required a knee on the bag and both hands and a sound she didn't like. At the bottom - under everything, was a bus ticket from the night before, folded twice, the ink still legible: Rossio, 22:47 - the price handwritten in a conductor's blue ballpoint - she hadn't even known she'd kept it.
The rooster's beak sat separate, a white comma on the table. She tried balancing it back against the stump of his face and it slid off and landed on the cork. The ginjinha had dried into a dark halo on the inside of the bag's lining, and the coaster had absorbed it into something permanent, the color of an old bruise. The bus ticket, still in her jacket pocket - was legible under the kitchen light - Rossio, 22:47 - the conductor's blue ballpoint as clean as the night she hadn't noticed slipping it in there.
The grocery bag sat by the door for three weeks, the handles knotted, the plastic gone milky at the fold. She stepped around it every morning in her socks. In March she put her hand in the inside pocket of the wool jacket - the one she'd worn to her cousin's thing, the one that needed dry cleaning - and her fingers found the bus ticket before she found her lip balm - the blue ballpoint still clean, Rossio, 22:47, the ink holding.
On the twelfth day she carried the grocery bag to the bin by the gate, the knotted handles leaving a red crease across her palm - and on the way back across the wet concrete she put her hand in her coat pocket for no reason she could name. The stone was the size of a thumbnail, gray-green, smoothed into something almost oval, the weight of a large button. She'd picked it up outside a doorway in the Alfama where a cat had been sitting on a step - not even stopped, just bent mid-stride and closed her hand around it. She stood on the wet concrete and turned it once - twice, the way you do when you already know you're keeping it.
She set it on the sill above the sink, between the windowframe and nothing, on the left where the caulk had gone the color of old tape. The tap ran. Steam rose and the stone went darker, almost green - and stayed that way after the water was off. She moved the dish soap twice over the following weeks, once left, once right, working around it without thinking, the way you work around a chip in a mug you've decided not to throw out.
Her mother came in April and stood at the sink washing her hands and looked at the stone the way she looked at things she was deciding not to ask about. She picked it up - turned it once, set it back on the wrong side of the soap. She didn't move it back. For a week she left it there, the stone now between the soap and the windowframe instead of the frame and nothing, a small relocation she noticed every morning when she reached for her coffee mug and then, without meaning to - stopped noticing.
A postcard arrived from her friend who'd gone to Lisbon the following autumn, a blue-and-white azulejo pattern, the corner bent from the post, and she propped it on the sill against the windowframe and it stood there for a day before she moved it to the corkboard above the desk, which meant the stone was visible again - no longer half-behind anything, just itself in the light that came through at four o'clock and made the gray-green go briefly amber. She looked up the bus line once, typed Rossio into a search bar, closed the tab. The ticket was still in the wool jacket, which had come back from the dry cleaner in a thin plastic sleeve and gone straight to the hook by the door - and sometimes when she reached past it for her everyday coat her knuckles brushed the plastic and she felt, through it, the bulk of the folded paper in the inside pocket, the small rectangular fact of it, the conductor's blue ballpoint still holding somewhere in there against the dark.
She packed for a long weekend in February and took the wool jacket off the hook - and when she laid it on the bed to check the pockets the ticket was still there, the paper softer now, the crease worn to something close to cloth. She unfolded it once and folded it back and set it in the inside pocket of the bag she was actually taking, the bag without a name, the one with the broken clip on the front that she'd been meaning to replace since the year before last. The stone she moved from the sill to the shallow dish by the stove - the one that held a rubber band and a foreign coin and a button that didn't match anything she still owned, and she stood there a moment with her hand flat on the cold ceramic like she was checking a temperature, then went to finish packing.
She found the stone again in July, in the shallow dish, when she was looking for the rubber band to close a bag of coffee - and she picked it up without stopping and carried it to the windowsill and set it back in the left-hand spot, the one with the old caulk, and only then noticed she'd done it. The wool jacket went to her sister in June - the dry cleaner plastic still on, the ticket still in the inside pocket, the blue ballpoint holding - because her sister had a cousin's thing in Edinburgh and the right coat and her sister didn't know about Rossio and there was no way to explain the ticket without explaining the ticket. She bought a new jacket in August - charcoal, no inside pocket, just the two outside ones, and she stood in the shop with her hands in both at the same time, feeling the flat nylon lining - and bought it anyway. That night she set the stone on the sill of the new flat she didn't have yet, in a city she hadn't decided on, and then blinked and it was just the stone on the sill above the sink, the dish soap on its left, the four-o'clock light coming through.
