Impossible Market
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Impossible Market.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Stalls run under iron arches. Lamps are already lit. Their flames stand short and do not smoke the vault black. Smoke hangs over brass scales, a low layer that moves when no one walks through it. Through the open roof, one moon stands where the roof should end. A painted star-chart nailed to a stall shows that moon and no other. The paint is old. The nail has rusted into the wood. A hand rests at a scale. Both sides are empty. The chains hang even. Two figures stand at the stall and do not buy. Their hands stay off the goods. Cloth, metal, and closed boxes wait in their places. The seller does not call them closer. The seller's palms stay on the stall's edge.
The empty scale tips toward the arch. It tips slowly, one side rising, the needle walking its short arc. The hand lifts away. Nothing has been set in either side, and still the needle does not return. The scale remains tipped, pointing its needle at the open roof. A second moon is there, lower and dimmer, and it is not on the chart. Smoke drifts across it and does not hide it. The lower moon clears the smoke and stays clear. The chart's single painted moon does not gain a twin. A corner of the chart curls in the heat of the nearest lamp and curls no farther.
The two figures look up once and return their eyes to the stall. They still do not buy. One of them touches a closed box and takes the hand back without opening it. The seller's hand stays off the scale. The needle does not fall back. It trembles at the top of its lean and holds. A lamp along the arch spits, recovers, and burns level. The tipped scale's empty side keeps its rise.
Lamps burn along the hall. Smoke keeps its slow drift across the open roof, thinning and gathering and never covering the second moon. The tipped scale keeps its lean. The two figures remain at the stall with their hands off the goods. Two moons hold where the roof ends, and the stall's chart remains a chart of only one, its curled corner still short of hiding the painted disc it was nailed up to keep.
The seller does not chalk a new price for a moon the chart lacks. The two figures' coats do not open. A scale at the next stall, this one with goods in one side, stays level and does not copy the lean. Smoke thins, thickens, and keeps its slow crossing of the lower moon. The needle at the empty scale holds its point at the open roof. Iron arches take the lamp-light and give it back dull. No one climbs to the roof to name what has appeared. The hall remains a hall of stalls, and the second moon remains outside every chart nailed beneath it.