The candle

The table is plain. The candle is a stub, burned down and re-set in its own wax more times than is sensible. Its light goes about as far as two chairs and no further, and that turns out to be exactly as far as it needs to go.

“That is the whole shop,” the woman says, when you ask what she sells. “Not the candle. That.” She nods at the ring of light. “Everything at those stalls is stock. Books, maps, cards. Stock is easy. The thing nobody can sell you is four people and an evening, so we sell the excuses instead and hope you use them.”

“You can take a candle. Everybody may. It only burns while somebody is still playing, which sounds like a threat and is really just a fact.”