Last summer, I overheard my coworker say she was going to take her out-of-town friends to the Saint-Michel Flea Market. I was intrigued. I’d never been to a flea market before, but growing up, I had watched an excess of HGTV and Flea Market Flip was a favourite. It consistently left me wondering about the mystery of an establishment where antique grandfather clocks and still-operational foosball tables could occupy the same space and time. 

I ventured up to the eastern end of the metro’s Blue Line, seeking the unusual on a stifling August afternoon. When I emerged from Saint-Michel station, I turned into a large parking lot behind a McDonald’s drive-thru. Across the lot, beneath an overhang and marked by a large sign reading “ANTIQUITÉS,” the market sat waiting. 

Entering, I had the distinct feeling that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore—so far away from Saint-Laurent’s curated vintage boutiques and the overwhelming lights of the Eaton Centre. The place was huge, labyrinthian. It spanned two floors, with seemingly infinite space to cover in between them. The vendors’ stalls sat makeshift-wall-to-makeshift-wall, separated by loose-hanging curtains and tarps. 

The Saint-Michel Flea Market, at only thirty-odd years old, has successfully curated a pocket of the city that belongs entirely to another time. When it opened in the early nineties, it boasted articles new and old. But now vendors sell primarily aged finds—antique furniture, eclectic home decor, collectors’ items like DVD box sets of Entourage. There are no trendy fashions or novel modes of payment. The market doesn’t even have an email address. There is something refreshing about such a place and its constancy, a contrast to the ceaseless change of the outside world.

As I weaved through the stalls, the first thing that caught my eye was a banker’s lamp, the kind with the green glass shade and beaded pull cord that I’d recently been coveting. The price tag read $90. I may have been excited, but I was still a reasonable girl. I couldn’t fork over that much for a lamp. Besides, the shade had a chip in it. That was the sort of thing you could leverage in a negotiation, right? I approached the vendor—an elderly man with tiny glasses—and noticed his disapproving look, which didn’t bode well. Negotiations were quick. I asked him if he would take $70, he said no, and that was that. 

Slightly heartbroken, I moved on. Upstairs I found a man selling records. I leafed through the bins and picked out Electric Light Orchestra’s A New World Record, Linda Ronstadt’s Simple Dreams. I turned them over, noting each tiny tear in the sleeves and their ripe smell. I wondered who had owned and discarded these before me; how many cities had they travelled, in how many cars and trains? How many first dates, late-night parties or slow Sunday mornings had they soundtracked?

My favourite find of the day was a tiny silver ring with a horse on it. I bought it for a dollar and wore it on my pinky; it was slightly loose there, but too small for any other finger. It became part of my ring repertoire for two months until, at the end of a fateful drive back from Toronto, I realized it was missing. I went back outside, in front of my Plateau apartment, where a friend had dropped me off. I waved my flashlight over the pavement, stooping down in the road and on the sidewalk. I asked my friend to search the car. But the ring was gone, lost somewhere between Toronto and Montreal. 

I miss it, but sometimes I get this giddy feeling too, fantasizing about where it ended up, if it ever settled at all. I like that I’m a part of its story now, and that it’s out there meaning something to somebody else; a barista at a cafe, a person I sit next to briefly on the metro. Somebody I’m connected to without knowing it. It makes anything seem possible. In a decade, my ring may end up back at the Saint-Michel Flea Market, tangled with a hundred others in a small, unsuspecting bin, waiting to be found. ⁂

Gabrielle Cole is a Jamaican Canadian writer and student, currently residing in Montreal and pursuing her MA in Creative Writing at Concordia University.