Welcome to Willith and Marrow, your neighborhood’s new charming small business. We sell provisions. We won’t tell you what that means, but we used a wavy, sans-serif font and put our name almost indecipherably small in the top right-hand corner of our storefront window. We hope that helps you “get” our “brand.”

Other than that, we don’t feel like we need to explain ourselves to you. If you don’t instantly feel a spiritual connection with Willith and Marrow, then you can buy your provisions elsewhere. We don’t interest ourselves in doing “business” in the traditional sense.

All we’ll say is that most people who walk past our store end up surrendering to our whimsy, and eventually, you will too. Before you can fully grasp the concept of what a “provision” actually is, you will probably be lured into our store by the scent of a distant winter memory. That’d be one of our house-made candles; it’s called “Romance of the Ember,” and it’s meant to invoke the image of a cold nineteenth-century orphan sleeping by a dying fire.

Once inside our store, you’ll be instantly ignored by our employee, Opal, for she might be churning butter. If you have questions about our products, do NOT ask her. She is timid, and her voice is too soft for the human ear to hear. We recommend just looking around and determining a product’s use or purpose for yourself.

We won’t explain why, but here are some of things we offer in exchange for money (“sell” is such a harsh word):

  • A delicate bespoke broom that you cannot use for sweeping.
  • A stool too low to sit or put your feet on, and too fragile to place anything on top of it. Don’t even look at it, actually.
  • A forty-eight-dollar bottle of olive oil, which might almost make sense to you, until we explain that only half of the bottle is full of olive oil and the other half is just air, but the air was sourced in Tuscany, of course.
  • Numerous specialty foods, which means we have ten different kinds of gourmet mayonnaise but not the kind you like. Next to the mayonnaise is where we display our line of hard, wooden, color-free baby toys for babies who live and die for aesthetics over function. Babies with good taste.

Also, on certain Mondays, for one hour, we sell discarded human teeth in little jars. It’s up to you to decide whether or not that’s legal.

Perhaps you’ve come to Willith and Marrow to buy a holiday gift, or you’ve simply stumbled in and remained out of guilt because you’re the only person here, and Opal is staring at you from her rocking chair. Whatever brought you in, rest assured we offer something for everyone. And by that, we mean that there is nothing for anybody, especially if you’re looking for something. So don’t come here to shop for something, or expect to find anything at all. Does that make sense?

We don’t really care. Willith and Marrow exists as more of a commentary on commerce than as another cog in the retail machine. We refuse to explain ourselves to you, but when you do come in, prepare to be wowed, to be a little bit nervous, to be extra careful when touching our products, to gaze longingly at tiny handcrafted spoons that you want for no explicable reason, and to leave asking yourself, “Wait, how did I just spend sixty-five dollars on mayonnaise?”