In the old days you did not borrow money. You borrowed rice. One measure out, one measure back at year's end, and the shopkeeper's stick came across the mouth of the dou to strike it level so that everyone could see what a measure was.
He borrowed three years running and paid none of them back.
The fourth spring the shopkeeper turned the measure upside down on the counter, and on the base of it were cut a row of deep lines, worn shiny from handling. One measure, one year, the shopkeeper said.
He put his hand flat on the counter and held it there a while. Then he pressed his thumb against the lines and signed for three.
He was forty-two that year. The hand that pushed the door curtain aside on his way out was already older than the hand that had come in. By the next year he looked fifty. By the year after, sixty.
In the fourth year he came back to redeem it, and the shop was darker than he remembered, and the man behind the counter was not the shopkeeper. It was a young man drawing the stick across the mouth of the measure with exactly the shopkeeper's motion.
Where's the owner, he said, in a voice that had gone thin.
The young man set the stick down. I am, he said.
The old man's hands went out to the counter and stayed there, shaking. Behind them on the counter the measure sat upside down, and there were more lines cut into its base than there had been three years ago, and the last few were very new.