The basket is wire, and it was wired on, which is two kinds of wire doing the same job badly. Someone before me ran a loop of baling wire through the front lattice and around the bars and twisted it off. The twist has loosened. So now the basket sits in a socket of its own slop, half an inch of play in every direction.
Empty, it is loud. This is the part I did not expect. A full basket rides quiet, the groceries pinning it down, the weight signing for the ride. Empty, it has nothing to lose. It chatters over the expansion joints, the frost heaves, the manhole lip by the church. A high, tinny gossip that runs ahead of me down the block.
People hear it before they see me. The woman with the two dogs turns at the corner now without looking, because the corner already told her. The kid who sells eggs waves at the sound before I round the hedge. I have stopped being a surprise anywhere on this street. I am not sure I mind.
I could fix it. A zip tie at each corner, thirty seconds, and the noise would stop. I keep meaning to. I keep not doing it, because the noise has become a kind of report. The road, read aloud. Every seam I cross, the basket says the seam is there.
Today it rattled harder on the way home than the way out. Same road. I checked the twist and it had backed off another quarter turn, the wire end standing up now, bright where it had rubbed itself clean against the frame.