The market comes once a season, always on the last dry night before the rains break, and it never comes to the same place twice. This year it was past the mango grove, where the old cassava field had gone to weeds. Ama found it the way everyone finds it — by smelling smoke where there should have been none.

There were no torches. The light came from somewhere under the tables, a low orange glow like coals banked for morning, and it lit the stalls from beneath so that the vendors’ faces sat in shadow no matter which way she turned. She counted eleven stalls. She would count them again on the way out and get a different number, and she would not mention this to anyone.

“You are welcome to look,” said the woman at the first stall, though Ama hadn’t asked. The woman was old in the way riverbanks are old — worn smooth, not tired. Her table held nothing but small clay jars, unlabeled, corked with wax. “Everything here has already been paid for. You only have to be the one it was paid for.”

Ama had come for her brother. Kollie had stopped sleeping three weeks ago, not from worry, he insisted, but from something that sat on his chest at night and would not introduce itself. She had heard, the way you hear things in a town where nobody says anything directly, that the night market sold what regular medicine wouldn’t touch, provided you understood what you were spending.

“I have money,” she said, because it seemed like the thing to say.

The woman almost smiled. “The market doesn’t want money. Money is the easiest thing to give away — you can always make more of it, or pretend you will. The market only takes what costs you something to lose.” She lifted one of the jars. Inside, faintly, something moved. “A name only your mother used. The last hour of a good year. The reason you stopped speaking to your father. Small things. Whole things. It doesn’t care which, as long as you felt its weight before you let it go.”

Ama thought of Kollie’s face at four in the morning, gray as ash, insisting he was fine. She thought of their mother, who would ask about him and be told he was fine, because that was the family’s whole religion — everyone was fine until they weren’t, and by then it was too late to be anything else.

“What do I get,” she asked, “for the last real conversation I had with him before he stopped sleeping?”

The woman set the jar down and, for the first time, looked directly at her — and in that low copper light her eyes were the only part of her that seemed entirely awake. “You get to keep asking that question for the rest of your life, because once it’s given, you don’t get to know if it worked. That is the market’s oldest rule, and the only one it has never broken. You give, and you walk home, and you never learn whether you were the one who fixed him or only the one who paid.”

Ama stood there long enough that the coal-light seemed to dim and brighten with her breathing. Behind her, faintly, she heard the eleventh stall pack itself away, though she hadn’t seen anyone tending it.

She thought about the last conversation — Kollie laughing at something small, before whatever came to sit on his chest had learned his address. She thought about never being sure if giving it away had bought him a single hour of sleep.

She reached into her memory anyway, the way you reach into a fire for something you dropped, and found it was already loosening at the edges, already softening into something she could hand across the table.

“Take it,” she said.

The woman didn’t reach for anything. There was nothing to reach for. But the coal-light guttered once, like a held breath let go, and when Ama turned to leave, she counted the stalls again without meaning to.

Nine.

She never mentioned that to anyone either. And in the morning, when she came into the kitchen, Kollie was already up, moving slowly around the pot of rice like a man testing whether his own legs still worked, and when he saw her he said, “I slept,” in the voice of someone reporting a strange piece of news about a stranger.

She never asked him if he remembered the conversation she’d given away. Some part of her already knew the answer, and some larger part of her had decided, standing in that field of coal-light and weeds, that she would rather not be sure.