The stall was between a spice merchant and a leather shop in the back corridors of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, where the tourist foot traffic thinned and the air smelled like cardamom and old stone. Claire almost walked past it. Would have, if the woman behind the counter hadn’t spoken in English.
“You’re carrying too much.”
Claire stopped. The woman was old. Not elderly-old. Old the way certain buildings are old, where the age is in the bones of the thing and the surface has stopped trying to keep up. She sat on a low stool behind a wooden counter covered with small glass bottles, each one stoppered with black wax.
“Excuse me?”
“Your shadow.” The woman nodded toward the floor. “It’s heavy. Too many things attached to it. Grief, yes? And guilt. The guilt is the heavy part. Grief floats eventually. Guilt just sinks.”
Claire looked at her shadow on the stone floor. It looked like a shadow. It looked normal.
“I can take some of the weight off. Not all. You need some shadow or you stop being real. But the extra, the parts that drag, those I can remove.”
“That’s not possible.”
“You’re in Istanbul, dear. Lots of things are possible here that aren’t possible in…” She squinted at Claire. “Minneapolis.”
Claire hadn’t told her she was from Minneapolis.
“How much?”
“Forty lira for the grief. Eighty for the guilt. Both together, a hundred.”
“That’s like three dollars.”
“The shadow market isn’t what it used to be.”
Claire should have walked away. She knew that. She was a data analyst with a graduate degree and a healthy skepticism of anything that couldn’t be expressed as a spreadsheet. But her mother had died in April, and the divorce had been final in June, and she’d come to Turkey because the grief counselor said travel helps and the travel agent said Istanbul was on sale.
“Both,” Claire said.
The woman selected a bottle from the counter. The glass was dark, almost black, and something inside it shifted like smoke. She unstoppered it and set it on the floor beside Claire’s shadow.
“Stand still.”
Claire stood still. The woman muttered something in a language that wasn’t Turkish, wasn’t Arabic, wasn’t anything Claire recognized. The shadow on the floor rippled. Then a portion of it, a dark patch near the feet that Claire hadn’t noticed was darker than the rest, peeled away like a layer of paint and drifted into the bottle.
The woman stoppered it. Claire’s shadow looked thinner. Lighter. She felt lighter too, in a way she couldn’t explain. The persistent ache behind her sternum, the one that had been there since the hospital, eased by a degree. Not gone. But loosened.
“What do you do with it?” Claire asked.
“Sell it to someone who needs more shadow. Artists, mostly. Writers. People who make things out of pain. They come here when they feel too light, when the work won’t come because they’ve healed too much.” She smiled. “The economy of suffering is very efficient.”
Claire paid the hundred lira. She walked out of the bazaar and into the Istanbul afternoon and stood in Sultanahmet Square with her new, lighter shadow stretching behind her on the cobblestones. She breathed. The air tasted like tea and diesel and salt from the Bosphorus.
She thought about the bottle on the counter. Her grief and guilt, stoppered in dark glass, waiting for some artist to buy them and make something beautiful out of what had nearly crushed her.
She hoped they’d get a good price.
