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“It was a market. She hung back as she found it, better to take it in, to manage her overloaded senses a moment before she tried to step closer, step in. Market stalls laden with the bright fruits of high summer, with verdant banks of vegetables, glistening with newly caught fish. The multilayered sweetness of every fruit in season— some she knew: apricots, grapes, greengages; some she didn’t. The slick saline memory of the deep, from the arrested body of each fish and crab. Each new scent she encountered was a puzzle, a challenge to the senses, to her memory. But there were a dozen here, a hundred. She reeled a moment. Steadied herself, feet to cobbles. Roasted meat and toasted pastry. The funk of horse manure, the bitter tang of coffee. The many-colored perfumes of late-morning townsfolk, sweat and cotton, youth and age, hair and soap, garlic-on-skin and hunger-on-breath.” — Catherine Kurtz