Minutes for Sale

They say the first thing you lose is perspective.

The Market opens at midnight, in the basements of cities where clocks no longer tick but pulse, endlessly, in red neon. A place where no one trades gold or paper or digital credits. Here, the only currency is time itself—minutes lived, hours endured, days survived.

They are extracted through a device that hums against your temples, pulling the memory-thread taut until it detaches with a snap. The buyer receives not only the duration, but the lived sensation within it: laughter, pain, hunger, warmth. They slip it under their skin like an infusion, wearing it as if it had always been theirs.

Some come to sell. Some to buy. All come desperate.

I. The Seller

I was one of the desperate.

I had debts stacked higher than my days left to live. The Market promised release: every minute was worth something. A childhood afternoon could pay for rent. A first kiss might buy you a week of silence from creditors. A parent’s voice, sold to the highest bidder, could keep the lights on a little longer.

I swore I would not touch the golden years. But hunger gnaws harder than nostalgia. So I sold.

At first, it was small things: the taste of chocolate on a summer day, the way rain used to patter against my window when I was safe inside. Then larger pieces: my brother’s laughter, the first time I rode a bike without falling.

Each sale made me lighter—and emptier.

II. The Buyers

They were everywhere.

The rich, of course, who had tired of their own indulgent days and craved the raw texture of lives they’d never lived. They paid handsomely for working-class hours, for the grit and ache of hunger, for the joy of fleeting innocence they themselves had never known.

But there were others. The lonely, who collected memories like charms to replace their missing ones. The powerful, who stitched entire narratives out of purchased time, weaving themselves into heroes they had never been.

And the addicts. Those who craved the intensity of other lives, burning through memories like drugs, always seeking the next hit of reality not their own.

III. The Cost

The Market does not warn you what happens when you sell too much.

I noticed it one morning. A hollow where a smile should have been. A photograph of me and my brother that stirred nothing. His name slipped from me like water through fingers.

I had not just sold the memory. I had sold the bond, the meaning, the thread that tied me to who I was.

And the more I sold, the more I became a stranger in my own life.

IV. The Last Transaction

One night, desperate for enough credits to erase my final debt, I sold it: the day my mother died.

I told myself it was mercy. Who needs to relive that agony? Who needs the sharp edge of loss cutting, again and again?

But the next morning, I woke and felt nothing. No grief. No love. Just a hole where she had been.

And in that moment, I understood the Market’s true cruelty.

It wasn’t just stealing time. It was unmaking us.

Selling minutes until we became seconds, selling seconds until we became nothing.

V. Epilogue

They say the Market never closes.

That when the world finally runs out of money, only time will remain.

And I—hollow, weightless—wander the stalls not as a seller, not as a buyer, but as something in between.

A man unstitched from his own life, watching strangers live my memories better than I ever did.

I am still alive.

But I no longer know who it is that breathes.