The second tray

A man in Ismailia roasts and spices nuts at home and sells them in paper bags to the people on his street and a few of their cousins. One tray a night, about thirty bags a week. They sell out, and people ask when the next lot is ready.

He has noticed, though, that the oven takes two trays. The second rack sits bare every evening. After a while that bare rack starts to bother him.

Empty room feels like a debt. If he could fill sixty bags, surely he should. If sixty, then he needs sixty buyers, which means strangers, posting, discounting, chasing. The question of what to do with the space has turned, without his choosing it, into the question of how to sell more.

That is the old story of making things. When a workshop could only turn out a few, the few always found an owner. Once it could turn out many, the many needed persuading, and persuading became a job of its own.

But a bare rack is not an instruction. It is room. It could stay bare. It could hold a slower roast at a lower heat that tastes better. It could hold a new spice mix he tries on the street first and drops if they shrug.

Having space does not oblige anyone to fill it with more of the same.

The pull toward more is persuasive, and it likes to dress up as ambition. The other question is quieter, and harder: with the oven I have, what would make the thirty bags better?