The Stall Nothing Leaves
Four rows down, the lanterns hang further apart, and there it is: a stall grown into a hillock of everything. Teapots, trumpets, birdcages, a ship's wheel, seven hundred umbrellas, a stuffed bear with an apologetic expression — all of it stuck fast to all of it, a beach where things wash up and never leave. On the very top, tarnished and flat-looking, hangs a little silver bell.
In the middle of the hoard, in a nest of things, sits the Grabby Man. He is long and grey-fingered and folded like a spider in a deck chair, and his eyes follow everything that passes with a terrible, hungry attention. Nobody stops at his stall. Nobody has stopped, you can tell, for years — the ground in front of it is unworn. He watches the crowds go by, and his long fingers open and close on nothing.
You watch from behind a pillar of umbrellas. The bell is right there — an easy climb, ten seconds of nerve. But you saw a moth land on that hoard a minute ago, and the hoard held it, and the Grabby Man's eyes went to it with something that wasn't even greed anymore. Just habit, worn deep as a riverbed.
There's the fast way. And there's the thing your gut is telling you about a man nobody has handed anything to in living memory.