A hot surge of anger shot through me the moment my lights died for the second weekend in a row.
My neighbor’s glitter-dusted empire blazed away next door, powered by a secret extension cord I’d just discovered snaking out from her tent and plugged directly into my power strip.
When I confronted her, she had the audacity to call it “community power.”
That was before she began hiding my business sign behind the trash can and poaching my customers right in front of me.
She had no idea that her cheap extension cord and complete disregard for safety regulations were about to hand me all the evidence I needed to get her permanently relocated to a powerless, unvisited corner of the market right next to the dumpsters.
The Subtle Art of the Uninvited Guest: The Flicker of Doubt
The first Saturday of the Artisan’s Grove Market always had a special kind of magic. A low-lying mist burned off the grass by 8 a.m., leaving behind the scent of damp earth and brewing coffee. My little ten-by-ten tent felt like a sanctuary. Inside, my world was black ink and cream paper, the graceful curve of a capital ‘S’, the satisfying scratch of my favorite nib. I’m a hand-lettering artist. I create custom quotes, wedding vows, little love notes from the universe that people frame and hang on their walls. My name is Yvette, I’m forty-seven, and this little tent is my happy place.
My husband, Mark, had helped me set up the lighting, a string of warm, Edison-style bulbs that made my stall glow like a beacon of cozy. They cast a lovely light on the gold foil accents in my prints and made the whole space feel inviting. A woman was admiring a piece, a simple quote from Mary Oliver: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
She smiled, her finger tracing the script. “This is just beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I started to say, but the words caught in my throat. The cozy glow vanished. My bulbs, my perfect, warm, inviting bulbs, went dark. A collective, disappointed “aww” came from the small group in my tent. The woman squinted at the print, the magic of the moment broken.
“Oh, what a shame,” she said, her interest already waning. She wandered off toward the booth next to mine.
My neighbor’s stall was an explosion of neon and glitter. It was packed with t-shirts bearing sassy sayings, tumblers coated in shimmering epoxy, and a hundred other loud, shiny things. And it was bright. Impossibly bright. Two massive LED light bars blazed away, making her sequined pillows sparkle like a disco ball. She had a heat press steaming in the corner. The woman who had just left my stall was now captivated by a mug that read, “I run on caffeine and chaos.”
My own booth was plunged into a gloomy twilight. I fiddled with the plug, traced the extension cord back to the central power pole provided by the market. It was plugged in securely. I tried a different outlet on my power strip. Nothing. It was just… dead.
A Neighborly Nudge
The owner of the glitter emporium, a woman maybe ten years younger than me with blonde hair piled in a messy bun and a perpetually cheerful, slightly strained smile, bounced over. “Having trouble?” she asked, her voice syrupy sweet.
“My lights just went out,” I said, frustration making my own voice tight. “The whole strip is dead.”
“Oh, bummer!” She peered at the power pole. “The wiring in this park is so ancient. It’s probably just a finicky outlet. Happens all the time.” She said it with the breezy authority of someone who had never experienced the problem herself. Her own stall continued to hum with enough electricity to power a small village.
I sighed, trying to force a polite smile. “I guess. It just killed a sale.”
“You’ll get another one!” she chirped. She then glanced at the small A-frame sign I’d placed at the edge of my stall, the one I had painstakingly lettered with my business name, “The Gilded Quill.” With a little hum, she nudged it with her foot, pushing it back a few inches. “There, that gives people more room to walk.”
It didn’t. It just tucked my sign neatly behind the leg of her display table, effectively hiding it from the main flow of traffic. I stared at the sign, then back at her. She was already flitting back to her booth, her attention captured by a new customer. I bit back the sharp retort that was on the tip of my tongue. She’s just trying to be helpful, I told myself, though it didn’t feel helpful at all. It felt like being erased.
I spent the rest of the day in the semi-darkness, watching customers pass by my shadowy stall, their eyes drawn to the dazzling light of my neighbor’s. I sold a few small prints to people who specifically sought me out, but my usual foot traffic was gone. Every time I looked over, the glitter woman—Candace, I learned her name was—was bagging up another t-shirt, her smile never faltering.
The Ghost in the Machine
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Mark said that night, turning my power strip over in his hands. He’d plugged the whole assembly—lights, strip, cord—into the wall in our garage. Everything lit up perfectly. “The fuse is fine. The cord isn’t frayed. The bulbs are all good.”
Mark is an engineer. He sees the world as a series of logical problems to be solved. An effect must have a cause. The fact that my rig worked perfectly at home but failed completely at the market was an illogical wrinkle that was driving him nuts.
“Maybe Candace was right,” I said, leaning against his workbench. “Maybe it’s just bad wiring at the park.”
“Then why was her booth lit up like Times Square?” he countered, his brow furrowed. “She’s running a heat press, Yvette. Those things draw a massive amount of amperage. If an outlet was going to trip a breaker, it would be because of her, not your dinky little 40-watt bulbs.”
He was right. It felt wrong. It was a small thing, a string of dead lights, but it had unsettled me. That market was my main source of income. It paid for our daughter Chloe’s art classes, the fancy gouache I liked to use, the occasional dinner out when I was too tired to cook. A bad market day wasn’t just a disappointment; it was a tangible financial hit.
Chloe, who had been scrolling on her phone, looked up. “That lady sounds sketchy, Mom. Did you see her plug anything in?”
“No, I wasn’t watching,” I admitted. “It all happened so fast.”
“Next time, watch,” she said, her teenage cynicism cutting through my adult tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt. “People are shady.”
Mark tested the last bulb. “Well, everything here is working perfectly. It’s a ghost in the machine.” He wrapped the cords neatly for me. “Just try a different outlet on the pole next week. Maybe that one was faulty.”
His logic was reassuring, but the feeling of unease lingered. It wasn’t just the power. It was the way she had moved my sign. The way her smile felt like a mask. It was a tiny, creeping suspicion that this was no ghost. It was sabotage.
Community Power
The second Saturday started with a knot in my stomach. I got to the park extra early and claimed an outlet on the opposite side of the power pole, as far from Candace’s designated plug as I could get. I set up my sign, planting its feet firmly and a little more aggressively in the walkway. For the first hour, everything was perfect. The lights glowed. Customers came and went. I made three good sales. I was starting to relax.
Then, at 10:15 a.m., peak customer time, it happened again. Blink. Darkness.
This time, a hot surge of anger shot through me. This was not a coincidence. I looked over at Candace’s booth. It was, if possible, even brighter than last week. She’d added a rotating, colored spotlight that was currently splashing shifting rainbow hues across a rack of shirts that said “Live, Laugh, Lasercut.” She was ringing up a customer and didn’t even glance my way.
My hands were shaking. I took a deep breath and walked to the back of my tent. Last week, my cord had been plugged into my power strip, which then went to the main pole. I’d done the same thing this week. But now, there was something new. Snaking out from behind my display table, almost invisible against the black fabric, was a thin, white extension cord that I had never seen before. It was plugged into the last available spot on my power strip.
I crouched down, my heart hammering against my ribs. I picked up the cord and followed it with my hand. It was taut, running along the grass, tucked neatly under the back edge of my tent wall, and into the back of Candace’s tent.
I stood up, the white cord dangling from my hand like a dead snake. I walked to the edge of my stall and stared at her until she finished with her customer and finally looked up, her smile bright and automatic.
“Problems again?” she asked, her voice dripping with mock sympathy.
I held up the cord. “This is yours, I assume?”
Her smile didn’t waver. She gave a little tinkling laugh. “Oh, thank God, you found it! I just needed a little boost for my new spotlight and all the pole outlets were taken. Hope you don’t mind!”
I was speechless. The sheer audacity of it. To sneak into my booth, steal my power, and then act as if she was the one who had been inconvenienced.
“It’s tripping my power, Candace,” I finally managed to say. “My lights are out. Again.”
“Oh, that’s weird,” she said, tilting her head. She gestured around the bustling market with a sweep of her glitter-manicured hand. “We’ve all got to help each other out, right? It’s all about community power.”
The Calculated Kindness Offensive: The Smile with Teeth
Her words hung in the air between us, a perfect little smokescreen of faux-bohemian bullshit. Community power. She said it with such sincerity, as if she were a pioneer woman asking to borrow a cup of sugar, not an energy vampire actively sabotaging my business.
For a moment, I just stared at her. I could feel the blood pounding in my ears. The righteous speech I wanted to deliver—a blistering tirade about boundaries and basic respect and the physics of electrical loads—died on my lips. The market was humming with people. A family with a stroller was trying to get by. Making a scene felt… unseemly. Weak.
“You can’t just plug into my strip without asking,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “It overloaded the circuit.”
Candace’s smile tightened, just a fraction. It was the first crack in her placid facade. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. Your little lamps can’t possibly draw that much power. My heat press is the real power hog, and it’s on a different circuit entirely.” She waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll just unplug the spotlight for a bit. No biggie.”
She didn’t apologize. She didn’t acknowledge any wrongdoing. She framed it as a favor to me, a concession to my melodramatic, low-wattage sensibilities. She breezed back into her tent, and a moment later, the white cord went slack. I trudged back to my power strip, unplugged her cord, reset the breaker button, and my lights flickered back on.
The relief was immediately soured by a simmering resentment. She had won. She had done exactly what she wanted, and the only consequence was a thirty-second conversation where she’d made me feel like the unreasonable one. Her smile, when she glanced over a moment later, was all teeth.
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