The first rain of the year came after midnight, the way it always does — without warning, smelling of dust and iron and everything at once.
I wasn't supposed to be out. But the smell of wet earth pulls at you like a song you've half-forgotten, and I followed it off the main road.
The lane behind the old cloth bazaar had always ended at a wall. That night it didn't.
It opened — lantern after lantern, stall after stall — further than the street had any right to go.
They were selling things you cannot hold. A jar of someone's courage, still warm. A bottled first kiss. A dream folded into a paper map.
The stall-keepers never called out. They only waited.
At the far end waited one who was clearly in charge — cloaked, unhurried, older than the rain.
“Everything here has a price,” she said, before I could speak. “Never money. You pay with something you'd miss.”
So I told her the truth. My grandmother used to hum a song when it rained.
Since she died I can't remember a single note of it — only that it was hers, and then mine, and now nowhere. I wanted it back.
The Keeper set a small glass bottle on the counter. Inside, something stirred and settled, like a sleeping bird.
“The song,” she said. “The price is the sound of her voice. You may keep one. Never both.”
