Trigger Warning

There are flea markets all across Florida, and this was not the worst of them. It had once been an aircraft hangar, but the local airport had closed over twenty years before. There were a hundred traders there behind their metal tables, most of them selling counterfeit merchandise: sunglasses or watches or bags or belts. There was an African family selling carved wooden animals and behind them a loud, blowsy woman named (I cannot forget the name) Charity Parrot sold coverless paperback books, and old pulp magazines, the paper browned and crumbling, and beside her, in the corner, a Mexican woman whose name I never knew sold film posters and curling film stills.

I bought books from Charity Parrot, sometimes.

Soon enough the woman with the film posters went away and was replaced by a small man in sunglasses, his grey tablecloth spread over the metal table and covered with small carvings. I stopped and examined them – a peculiar set of creatures, made of grey bone and stone and dark wood – and then I examined him. I wondered if he had been in a ghastly accident, the kind it takes plastic surgery to repair: his face was wrong, the way it sloped, the shape of it. His skin was too pale. His too-black hair looked like it had to be a wig, made, perhaps, of dog fur. His glasses were so dark as to hide his eyes completely. He did not look in any way out of place in a Florida flea market: the tables were all manned by strange people, and strange people shopped there.

I bought nothing from him.

The next time I was there Charity Parrot had, in her turn, moved on, her place taken by an Indian family who sold hookahs and smoking paraphernalia, but the little man in the dark glasses was still in his corner at the back of the flea market, with his grey cloth. On it were more carvings of creatures.

‘I do not recognise any of these animals,’ I told him.

‘No.’

‘Do you make them yourself?’

He shook his head. You cannot ask anyone in a flea market where they get their stuff from. There are few things that are taboo in a flea market, but that is: sources are inviolate.

‘Do you sell a lot?’

‘Enough to feed myself,’ he said. ‘Keep a roof over my head.’ Then, ‘They are worth more than I ask for them.’

I picked up something that reminded me a little of what a deer might look like if deer were carnivorous, and said, ‘What is this?’

He glanced down. ‘I think it is a primitive thawn. It’s hard to tell.’ And then, ‘It was my father’s.’

There was a chiming noise then, to signal that soon enough the flea market would close.

‘Would you like food?’ I asked.

He looked at me, warily.

‘My treat,’ I said. ‘No obligations. There’s a Denny’s over the road. Or there’s the bar.’

He thought for a moment. ‘Denny’s will be fine,’ he said. ‘I will meet you over there.’

I waited at Denny’s. After half an hour I no longer expected him to come, but he surprised me and he arrived fifty minutes after I got there, carrying a brown leather bag tied to his wrist with a long piece of twine. I imagined it had to contain money, for it hung as if empty, and it could not have held his stock. Soon enough he was eating his way through a plate piled with pancakes, and, eventually, over coffee, he began to talk.

* * *

The sun began to go out a little after midday. A flicker, first, and then a rapid darkening that began on one side of the sun and then crept across its crimson face until the sun went black, like a coal knocked from a fire, and night returned to the world.

Balthasar the Tardy hurried down from the hill, leaving his nets in the trees, uninspected and unemptied. He uttered no words, conserving his breath, moving as fast as befitted his remarkable bulk, until he reached the bottom of the hill and the front door of his one-room cottage.

‘Oaf! It is time!’ he called. Then he knelt and lit a fish-oil lamp, which sputtered and stank and burned with a fitful orange flame.

The door of the cottage opened and Balthasar’s son emerged. The son was a little taller than his father, and much thinner, and was beardless. The youth had been named after his grandfather, and while his grandfather had lived the boy had been known as Farfal the Younger; now he was referred to, even to his face, as Farfal the Unfortunate. If he brought home a laying fowl it would cease to give eggs; if he took an axe to a tree it would fall in a place that would cause the greatest inconvenience and the least possible good; if he found a trove of ancient treasure, half-buried in a locked box at the edge of a field, the key to the box would break off as he turned it, leaving only a faint echo of song on the air, as if of a distant choir, and the box would dissolve to sand. Young women upon whom he fastened his affections would fall in love with other men or be transformed into grues or carried off by deodands. It was the way of things.

‘Sun’s gone out,’ said Balthasar the Tardy to his son.

Farfal said, ‘So this is it, then. This is the end.’

It was chillier, now the sun had gone out.