Jun and the Sixteenth Window

"Fifteen," said Jun, and tapped his white paw on the step. Then he looked up at the corner window, high where the wall turned, and waited. The rain waited with him. It tapped on a hundred roofs, drummed soft on the awning over his head, and ran gurgling down the gutter pipe by the bakery door.

Jun was a fox cub, rust-red with one white paw and ears too big for the rest of him. Every evening he sat on the bakery's back step beside his mother, Opal, and counted the lit windows of the tall house across the courtyard. Warm yellow squares, one for each family inside. He counted them in the same order every night. One, two, three, up the side, then four, five, six, across the middle. Fifteen all told, and he saved the corner window for last.

The corner window was never lit. It stayed dark as a shut eye, night after night, while every other window in the tall house glowed. Jun tapped the stone. "Still dark," he said.

"Mm," said Opal. She was combing the rain out of her tail, slow and steady, one long stroke after another. "Maybe nobody lives there."

"Somebody might," said Jun. "Somebody might be sitting up there in the dark right now, wishing they had a lamp." He stood on his toes to see better. The corner window was small, and under it hung a flower box with one tired plant drooping over the edge. "What if they forgot how to turn it on?"

Opal made a soft sound through her nose, the laugh she kept for evenings. "How does a person forget a thing like that?"

"I don't know," said Jun. "But I could remind them."

Beside him on the step sat a warm roll the baker had left out, still breathing a little steam into the wet air. Jun was saving it for the end of the evening, when the windows went dark and the counting was done. He looked at the roll. Then he looked up at the corner window, and he began to try.

Jun knew every window by heart. The one with the plant pots on the sill belonged to somebody who sang while they cooked. The wide one at the top had a gray cat that slept against the glass with its tail hanging down. The corner one had nothing at all, and it was the one Jun thought about after the counting was done.

First he wagged. He wagged his tail in big sweeps, left and right, hello and hello, until his whole back wiggled and his ears flopped and his white paw slid on the wet stone. If anyone up there was looking down, they would see a friendly shape waving at them. He wagged until his tail ached. The corner window stayed dark.

"That was a good wag," said Opal. "Your best one yet."

"It wasn't enough," said Jun.

Next he found bottle caps. There was a crate behind the bakery door full of shiny metal caps, and Jun carried eleven of them to the step, one at a time, careful with his teeth. He lined them up. Four along the top, four along the bottom, three in the middle, and it made a square shape, a little window made of silver. "There," he said. "Now the dark one has a friend." The window up high stayed dark.

Then he tried a hello. He tipped his nose up at the corner and gave a soft, friendly yip, the one he used for Opal in the mornings. Something moved on the gutter above the bakery roof. A pigeon put its head over the edge and blinked down at him.

"Who's out there?" said the pigeon.

"It's me. Jun."

"Well, keep it down," said the pigeon. "Some of us are sleeping, some of us are wet, and none of us are happy about it."

"Sorry," said Jun. "Do you know who lives in the corner window? The one that's always dark?"

The pigeon ruffled its shoulders and shook a drop off its beak. "Ask the little one with the broom," it said. "She goes up in the walls." Then it tucked its head back under its wing.

Jun sat down on the warm stone. "The little one with the broom," he said. "Where would I even start?"

The rain leaned in sideways then, the way it does when the wind turns. It came under the awning in a cold gray sheet, found Jun's left ear, and set the whole step shining. Jun shook himself. Opal shook herself. Above them the gutter pipe gurgled and swallowed and gurgled again.

"Hh-choo."

The sneeze was so small that Jun felt it more than heard it, a pinch of sound by the bakery door. He turned around.

A mouse stood there, no taller than Jun's front leg, wet all the way through. Her coat was made from a folded tea towel, red and white checks, and it hung on her like a wet flag. She held a broom with a crooked handle, and her ears lay flat against her head, and rain ran off the end of her nose in one small clear drop.

"You're all wet," said Jun.

"Rain does that," said the mouse.

"I'm Jun."

"I'm Mim." She leaned her broom against the door frame and wiped her nose on her sleeve. "I sweep the bakery step every evening. The baker leaves me the corner of a loaf and I leave the step tidy. That's the arrangement."

Mim swept anyway. She pushed the rainwater off the step in small tidy strokes, and the rain put it back, and she pushed it off again. Jun watched her do it three times before he said anything.

"You picked a wet night for it," said Opal.

"They're all wet lately," said Mim. She looked at the warm roll on the step, and then she looked away fast, the way you do when you don't want anyone to see you wanting a thing.

Jun looked at the roll too. His tummy rumbled, and not a quiet rumble. It was the sort of rumble you could hear across a courtyard. Opal pretended not to hear it, which was kind of her.

Jun thought about that roll. It was his favorite thing in the whole evening. Then he thought about Mim dripping on the step with her ears flat and her small paws shaking. He pushed the roll across the stone with his nose, one push, then another.

"That's yours," said Mim. "I watched the baker put it out."

"I'm not the one who's wet," said Jun.

Mim looked at the roll. She looked at Jun. Then she picked it up in both paws, twice the size of her head, and took a bite, and a warm crumb fell down her front and she caught it. She ate until her ears came back up and her whiskers stopped dripping.

"There's a warm corner too," said Jun. He meant the corner of the step where the bakery oven breathed up through the stone, the warmest spot in the whole courtyard, the spot he curled up in every single night. He meant, come and sit in it. He didn't say it straight away, because it was his, and he loved it. Then he moved over.

Opal curled her long tail around them both, a warm red curl like a scarf, and Mim leaned into it. "Oh," said Mim. "Oh, that's better."

"Where do you go when the sweeping's done?" Jun asked.

Mim waved her nose at the tall house. At first Jun didn't understand. Then he did, and he sat up so straight that his ears pulled back. "The corner window," he said. "The dark one. That one's yours?"

"That's mine," said Mim. "I've got my own little stairs inside the bricks. Up and up and around, past the pipes, past the sleepy pigeon." She took another bite and chewed and swallowed. "I keep meaning to light my lamp. But by the time I've swept and carried my crumbs up all those stairs, my paws are too cold and my eyes are too heavy. So I roll up in my blanket and go to sleep in the dark."

Jun's tail went still. "So nobody forgot," he said.

"Nobody forgot," said Mim. "There was just nobody up there to be warm."

The rain drummed on the awning. Inside the bakery the clock clicked and clicked. Jun thought about all the nights he had tapped his paw and said still dark, while up behind that little window a mouse with a crooked broom rolled herself up in a blanket and slept with no light on.

"Mim," he said. "Would you light your lamp tonight? Just for a little while?"

"It's a small lamp," said Mim.

"Small is fine," said Jun.

Mim set down the very last of the roll. She straightened her wet checked coat and smoothed her whiskers. "You gave me your roll," she said, "and you gave me your warm corner. A lamp is easy after that."

She picked up her broom and went to the wall beside the bakery door. Jun had never once noticed the little crack there, but Mim walked into it like a door and her broom went after her, and for a moment Jun could hear tiny feet on tiny stairs, going up and up and around, past the pipes.

Opal sat still beside Jun. Jun sat still beside Opal. The rain grew soft, and then softer, until it was only a whisper on the awning and a drip in the gutter pipe.

Nothing happened.

"Sometimes a thing takes a minute," said Opal.

Then the corner window changed. It went from black to gray to a dot of gold, and the dot spread out like honey on warm bread until the whole square glowed. There was a small shape inside it, with round ears, lifting one paw.

Jun lifted his white paw back.

"Sixteen," he said.

"Sixteen," said Opal. She licked the top of his head, once, the way she did when a thing was worth a lick.

Mim turned her lamp down low, and then lower, but she didn't turn it off. She sat in her little chair by the glass with her paws wrapped around a cup of something warm, and she stayed there, a warm square in the dark of the tall house.

"She's leaving it on for me," said Jun.

"Or for herself," said Opal. "It's nice to have a light on when you're the only one home."

Under the awning the bakery lights went out, one, then the other, and the baker's shadow crossed the glass door and was gone. Across the courtyard the tall house was going dark too, square by square, the way it always did. Jun counted backward without meaning to. Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen.

"Time to curl up," said Opal. She wrapped her tail twice around her cub, and the step was warm underneath them, and the courtyard smelled of wet pavement and bread.

Jun put his chin down on his white paw. The rain was barely there now. One drop on the awning. A long pause. Another drop. Up where the wall turned, one small window held its light, steady and golden, like somebody keeping a place for him.

"Goodnight, Mim," said Jun, quiet as a yawn.

His eyes went closed on that warm square, and the rain tapped twice more, and then it stopped.