The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

Retrievers, not something as challenging, as
alive
, as this.
    After trying and failing at a number of approaches – unglassed, mounted on matte or gloss, set flat to be viewed from above – he finally placed it inside a shallow glass case so that there was empty air around it, a hint of diorama. The case itself had a tarnished gold edge around the corners, like the picture inside might have been in there for hundreds of years and might crumble to dust upon opening. It seemed like a relic from some alternate timeline, an artefact accidentally tumbled through from some other place.
    But then, where to put it?
    He hung it at home, but for some reason that didn’t seem right. Above his mantelpiece it looked indefinably wrong, a foreign visitor smiling politely and wondering when on earth this dinner party was going to end. The walls of the rest of his rooms were too crowded with books to give it enough space to breathe, so he tried hanging it above his bed. One startlingly incoherent sex dream later (landslides and grasslands and armies running over his very skin), he took it right back down.
    So finally, that only left the shop, where at least he would be able to see it every day and where it looked strangely comfortable, watching over him, not at all out of place, somehow, among the best examples of his shop’s work. And this was where he’d met her, of course. So maybe this tile, a crossroads of their two differing arts, just looked most natural hung in the same crossroads where their lives had intersected.
    He hung it above his desk, on the back wall, distant from the front counter, slightly too far to be seen clearly, he thought.
    But.
    ‘What on earth is
that
?’ the man in the suit said, picking up some freshly printed training folders because, he’d said, his secretary was sick. George looked up from his desk, from the small cutting he was making that seemed to be a still life of fruit (or possibly a spaniel) taking shape in front of him.
    ‘Don’t ask me,’ Mehmet said, still resentful the tile hadn’t been given to him. ‘I don’t think we’d call that art in Turkey.’
    ‘Then the Turks would be very foolish indeed,’ said the man in the suit, a kind of stunned dazzle in his voice. ‘Is it yours?’ he asked, looking at George keenly, as if on the verge of confirming something he’d always wanted to know. And he meant
Is it yours?
both ways, George realised. Had George made it? But also, George was curious to hear, did George own it?
    ‘The crane is mine,’ George said. ‘The dragon is . . .’ He paused for a moment, Kumiko’s name precious on his tongue. ‘Someone else’s.’
    ‘It’s extraordinary,’ the man said, simply, without undue emphasis, his eyes never moving from it.
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘How much is it?’
    George blinked, surprised. ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘How much are you offering?’ Mehmet said, crossing his arms.
    ‘It’s not for sale,’ George said.
    ‘But if it was?’ both Mehmet and the man said at exactly the same time.
    ‘It’s not. The end.’
    ‘Everyone has a price,’ the man said, looking slightly annoyed now, having been denied something he wanted, the injustice that outraged the modern world above all others.
    ‘That’s about the most hostile thing I’ve heard all day,’ George said.
    The man’s posture shifted. ‘I’m sorry. I genuinely am. It’s just that it’s so . . .’
    George waited to hear what the man would say. Mehmet seemed to be waiting, too.
    ‘. . . right,’ the man finally said.
    George was astonished to see the man’s eyes now swimming behind incipient tears.
    ‘Are you sure?’ said the man.
    ‘I’m sure,’ George said, but respectfully.
    ‘I’d pay good money,’ the man said. ‘More than you think.’
    And then he named a figure so extravagant that Mehmet actually gasped.
    ‘It’s not for sale,’ George said.
    Mehmet turned on him. ‘Are you
crazy
?’
    ‘You know,’ said the man, ‘I do actually