The Neon Tenders of Hollow Street

There was a knack to waking a sign without waking the whole block. Etta Rook had learned it by the time she could blow a perfect arc through broken tubing and still scold a shopkeeper for using a coffee thermos as a ballast weight. Her bench smelled of copper filings and citrus oil—she kept a little tin of candied orange peel on the sill because the alley’s night vendors swore the zest kept the glass from sulking in winter. Hollow Street was not the sort of place that accepted explanations; it preferred work and small, stubborn rituals. You acted. You tuned. You paid for the plumber with a tin of spiced buns. You mended the sign that called out to you.

Etta's workshop was a narrow room jammed with racks of glass, coils, and the kinds of tools that made normal people tilt their heads as if they'd walked into a particularly technical poem. A faded marquee in the window read ROOK & COIL in letters that puddled like old cigarette ash; she had painted the O twice and the K four times, and every repaint gave the letters a new argument with gravity. A battered rooftop sign leaned against the wall like a retired boxer. She called it Stan and pretended it answered back. "Stan," she told it as she wrapped a spool of wire, "if you start glowing on my watch, you'll have the decency to do jazz, not gospel."

Stan, predictably, flickered once and made a sound like a small, embarrassed cough.

There are people who learn a craft to avoid people. Etta wasn't one of them. She liked the particularities of patrons: Mrs. Ainsley's stubborn love of garlic in winter, the bakery downstairs that left unlabelled samplers that tasted faintly of star anise, the way the noodle stand never closed before midnight if there was a poet on the corner. The neon tended the small dramas of Hollow Street—announcements, passing apologies, the little bright stutters that said Someone is here—and Etta had sworn, years ago, that she would keep them honest.

Lena Hargreave knocked on the door with a hesitation that had nothing to do with knots or ladders. Her sign across the alley had been a warm, crooked smile on facades for seven years: a half-moon above painted glass that pulsed at evening like a wink. In the last week it had gone dim and then quiet enough that neighbors started to forget it belonged to someone. Lena's face had the careful angles of someone who had learned to fold herself small to let neighbors be louder. "It stopped talking," she said. "I—people don't come out." She did not ask for advice so much as for a tool to fix a thing she assumed had failed beyond her reach.