The Afterimage Market

At your market stall people sell the seconds they paid attention to, and every listen wears them out. Your rent is due Friday.

comic · farcical · wry · specific · Short, about 12 scenes

You play

Nico, Nico, thirty-six, a trained appraiser of afterimages who rents a small stall in the covered market, is short on this quarter's rent, and can tell a worn carrier from a copied one

How it begins

The woman wanted her money back because the sea had made her sad. She had bought it at Nico's stall on Saturday, twenty-two seconds of a stranger's August on a Cornish beach, exactly as much of it as the stranger had been paying attention to, and she had played it three times to make sure.