The Night Market That Sells Lost Time

My phone died at 12:01 a.m., and with it went the last excuse not to think. I ducked behind the noodle shop to escape the sideways rain, and the alley stretched longer than it had any right to—neon dragging itself across puddles like spilled paint. A velvet curtain rippled where a brick wall should be. When I pushed through, warm light and citrus air slipped over me like someone else’s coat.

Stalls leaned into each other beneath tarps stitched from canvas and space blankets. Strings of bulbs hummed. A rack of umbrellas whispered weather gossip when opened. A boy sold little jars labeled “Laughter, 2013.” A woman with oyster-gray hair stood behind a table of hourglasses, each tagged in neat handwriting:

Five minutes you wasted stalking your ex’s feed.

Seven minutes spent reading comments and feeling worse.

The long golden hour you gave to grief—fragments only.

“First time?” she asked. The sign above her read Auntie Mo’s: Lost Minutes, Found.

“Is this a joke?” I said.

“Clocks are jokes,” Auntie Mo said. “Time is plumbing. It leaks. We salvage.”

I almost laughed—then saw an hourglass with my name on it. Kira’s morning by the river. Inside, the sand glittered like frost. I heard the old willow creak, smelled snow chalking the air. I’d meant to write a poem that morning. Instead I’d gone to a meeting that could have been an email.

“How much?” I asked before I could stop myself.

She named a price. “You get the hour back,” she said. “Not the day. Spend it where you like. Mind the seepage.”

“The what?”

“Time tries to run home. People buy childhood and wake wanting popsicles.”

I bought it anyway. The glass was warm, as if the past had a pulse.

A man with a cigarette that didn’t smoke leaned against a pillar wrapped in calendars. “Careful,” he said. “This place makes remorse look like a coupon.”

“Do you work here?”

“I owe here,” he said. “Name’s Bird. You look like someone headed for the expensive aisle.”

“What’s expensive?”

“Anything you wish you’d said,” he said, nodding toward a sign that read Seventeen Perfect Pauses. “Or choices.”

“There’s a stall for choices?”

“Everything’s for sale except the past we actually lived. That one’s just for rent.”

I moved through corridors that shifted like a deck of cards being shuffled. A librarian in a tuxedo stamped slips labeled Returns. A teenager polished a spool called Two Weeks You Spent Trying to Be Who They Wanted. The rain on the tarps softened; the market exhaled.

At the far end, a stall with no sign: a table, a lamp, a notebook, a pen. The woman behind it wore a dawn-colored sweater. When she looked up, something in me gave way.

“Lucy?” I said.

She hadn’t been Lucy in years. She’d been we, then they, then a silence I telegrammed with unsent apologies.

“Hi, Kira,” she said. “Pick a choice. Tonight only. No refunds.”

“Does it change the past?”

“It changes you,” she said. “You’ll carry the version of yourself who chose it, like an extra heart.”

“I don’t know what to write.”

“Then write the choice that makes you kinder to who you became.”

The pen was heavier than it should’ve been. I wrote: I choose to call before the flight. I choose the true thing over the smart thing. I choose to forgive the version of me who learned too slowly. I signed my name. The ink bled like it had been waiting.

Lucy tore the page free. “Fold it,” she said. “Keep it near your voice.”

A bell rang—ice in a glass—and vendors snapped their booths shut with lunch-box briskness. The velvet curtain flexed. The tarps shook off the last drops.

“Did you get what you came for?” Bird asked.

“I didn’t know what I came for.”

“That’s usually how you find it.”

I pressed my palm to the curtain. “Lucy—will you—”

“I don’t belong to the market,” she said. “I just work this hour.” Her smile was smaller than the one I’d saved in my head, and truer. “Go spend what you bought.”

The alley reclaimed me: dumpsters, buzzing sign, feral cat on a fire escape. Under the streetlamp, I turned over the hourglass labeled The hour before you knew.

It opened like a window in winter. I was in my kitchen making toast, humming a dumb jingle, ignorant in the softest way. Across town, a radiologist circled something with a pencil. The future bent, ready to break.

I spent that hour touching everything: faucet, cracked tile, owl mug with the chip. I listened to the fridge breathe and the neighbor laugh. I stood still and let the hour spend me. When the last grain fell, nothing outside had changed. Inside, a room I’d kept locked slid open.

I tucked the folded choice under my pillow and slept hard. In the morning I called my father before he could forget, answered a stranger’s email yes, took the long way past the river and said good morning to the willow. That night I went back to the alley. The curtain was gone. The wall was wall.

In my coat pocket, the folded page warmed like a coin in sun. A new line had bled across the bottom in my own hand, though I hadn’t written it:

You chose to keep choosing.

I smiled at the empty bricks and the sideways rain. If the market never found me again, that was fine. I knew where to spend what time I had, and how to love the leaks.