Fermeture Annuelle: The Whole Street Is Shut

The note is taped to the inside of the glass. It thanks you for your fidelity. It gives a date in September. It suggests, with a generosity that borders on cruelty, another bakery — one that everybody on this street has silently agreed is inferior and will now be forced to patronise for twenty-eight days.

There is a system. The system is a laminated rota in a window. The rota is correct, and it has determined that this week the sick of eleven neighbourhoods will travel by metro, in the heat, to a single pharmacy near a station nobody uses, staffed by one woman who has seen everything.

They photograph a street that in June would be impassable. They marvel at how relaxed everyone seems, unaware that everyone is elsewhere. It is, briefly, the city they were promised — and the only reason it exists at all is that the people who live in it have left.