ACT I: THE CHAIR

Tom sat on his folding chair behind the plastic table and watched the rain fall on the tarp he had stretched between two chain-link fences. The tarp was gray now, stained with something that might have been oil or might have been rust or might have been both. The folding chair wobbled on the left leg, and Tom had stopped trying to fix it three months ago.

On the table: a stack of old denim jackets from the Goodwill bin behind the Walmart on Route 9, a pile of toy cars whose wheels had fallen off, three cans of soup that were past their expiration date but still sealed. Tom had bought all of it for twelve dollars at a liquidation auction, and he was hoping to get fourteen back.

The street was empty except for a dog that smelled worse than Tom and was moving in the same direction as Tom, which was nowhere.

"Rain's not letting up," said a voice.

Tom looked up. Pat was standing under the awning of the abandoned gas station across the street, holding a paper cup of coffee that steamed in the cold air. Pat had his own table two blocks over, selling the same kind of stuff Tom was selling, which was to say nothing worth buying.

"No," Tom said. "Ain't."

Pat came over anyway and stood in the rain at the edge of the tarp, which was as close as he got to sitting. They stood like that for ten minutes, watching the rain, drinking coffee, saying nothing. This was their conversation most days. Sometimes they talked about the weather. Sometimes they talked about nothing. Sometimes they didn't talk at all.

"城管 came by yesterday," Pat said.

Tom nodded. He had heard. The city had been cracking down on informal vendors, and two tables had been confiscated on Main Street the day before.

"They'll come for us today," Tom said.

"Yeah," Pat said. "They probably will."

They drank their coffee. The rain kept falling.

ACT II: THE DAY

Ellie came by at noon. She worked at the gas station that wasn't really a gas station anymore—the pumps had been broken for years, but the convenience store inside still sold cigarettes and lottery tickets and warm hot dogs to the people who lived in the trailers behind the station.

She stopped at Tom's table and looked at the denim jackets. She looked at the toy cars. She looked at the soup.

"Anything good today?" she asked.

Tom shook his head. "Same as yesterday."

"Same as every day."

"Yeah."

Ellie reached out and touched one of the denim jackets. The fabric was cracked and stiff, and a button was missing from the left pocket. She held it for a moment, then put it back.

"I'll come back tomorrow," she said. "Maybe you'll have something new."

"Maybe," Tom said. He didn't believe her, and she didn't believe him, but they both said it anyway, because that's what you said to someone who stopped by your table even though there was nothing to buy.

After Ellie left, Tom opened his lunch—a peanut butter sandwich on white bread that Pat had brought him that morning because Ellie at the gas station had too many packets of peanut butter and Pat didn't like peanut butter. Tom ate slowly, watching the street, watching the rain, watching the dog that had given up and was now sleeping under a car.

He thought about the factory. He had worked there for eighteen years, on the assembly line, putting together parts he would never see finished. The factory had closed in March, and they had given him a severance package that lasted four months. Four months of unemployment checks and a slowly emptying bank account and a wife who stopped asking when he'd find something else.

He had started selling things on the side—first just stuff from around the house, then stuff from garage sales, then stuff from liquidation auctions. It wasn't much, but it was something. And something was better than nothing, which was what he had before.

ACT III: THE CONFISCATION

They came at three o'clock. Two city workers in orange vests, driving a truck with a flatbed. They didn't ask questions. They didn't offer Tom a chance to pack up his things and come home later. They simply began loading the table onto the flatbed—the denim jackets, the toy cars, the soup cans, the plastic table, the folding chair.

Tom stood and watched. He did not argue. He had learned, over the years, that arguing with people in orange vests was like arguing with the weather. It was not ineffective because they were cruel. It was ineffective because they were indifferent, and indifference is a force of nature that cannot be persuaded.

"Can I at least keep the chair?" he asked.

The worker looked at him the way you look at a man who has asked you to reconsider the fundamental nature of reality. "Sure," he said. "Take the chair."

Tom picked up the folding chair. It was lighter than he expected, or maybe he was just weaker. He carried it to the curb and set it down carefully, the way you set down something that has carried you for a long time and you want to thank it without saying thank you out loud.

Pat came over and put a hand on Tom's shoulder. His hand was warm and heavy and real. "Tomorrow," he said. "We'll set up somewhere else."

Tom nodded. He had no energy for anything else.

ACT IV: THE COUNT

That night, Tom sat on the edge of his bed in the apartment he shared with his wife, who was watching television in the other room with the sound turned low. He counted the money from the day's sales: twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents. He had spent three dollars on coffee and two dollars on bread for sandwiches. His profit was nine dollars and thirty-seven cents.

He put the money in a jar on the windowsill. The jar already contained forty-three dollars and twelve cents, which was his total savings. He had stopped keeping money in the bank because the bank charged him twelve dollars a month in fees, which meant that every month he worked to lose twelve dollars, which was a kind of mathematics he had never understood.

Outside, the town was dark. The factory's silhouette stood against the night sky like the skeleton of something that had once been alive. There were no lights in the windows of the houses on his street. Most of the families had moved away. The ones who stayed were the ones who had nowhere else to go, which was to say the ones who had run out of options, which was to say people like Tom.

Tomorrow he would set up his table somewhere else. Pat had said a spot behind the community center that the城管 hadn't patrolled yet. Tom would bring the folding chair and the remaining stock and he would sit and wait for customers who might not come.

He would do it because there was nothing else to do. Not because he hoped things would get better. Not because he believed in anything. Because the alternative was sitting in this chair in this apartment and listening to the television and counting the money in the jar and knowing that the number would never go up.

So he would go out and sell old jackets and broken toys and expired soup. And tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, until the rain stopped or he stopped or the chair broke.

Probably the chair would break first.