The Market

A story about what happens when knowing something exists becomes seeing it.

Read this before you go any further. This one isn’t funny. There’s no payoff, no redemption arc, no poetic twist where everything softens at the edges. If you don’t want to read something that stays with you in a bad way, probably best to leave now. I mean that. This isn’t one for the weak. It’s not even one for me, if I’m honest.

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We were in Vietnam, just travelling, just moving around from place to place, just doing that thing you do when you’re young enough to think the world is something you can walk through without it sticking to you. There’s a version of the story where it’s simple: a wet market, a few friends, heat, noise, life everywhere. And if you’ve never been, wet markets aren’t what people imagine. They’re not some hidden thing. They’re normal. Daily life. Food laid out fresh, water running across the ground, everything moving, everything alive in a way supermarkets forgot how to be. It’s loud, it smells like metal and salt and something you can’t quite place, something that sits just behind your nose and won’t leave. It’s human. And then there are the parts you don’t prepare for.

We walked through it slowly, not tourists exactly, but not not tourists either, just… there, existing in it without really belonging to it. And then we saw the cages. Dogs. Stacked. Wired. Waiting. You don’t really understand something like that until it’s right in front of you. Not on a screen. Not in an article. Just there, breathing, looking back. One of the lads, too good of a guy, heart in the right place, he couldn’t handle it. Said he’d buy one. Set it free. That was his plan. That was the story he told himself in that moment, the version where things turn out better because you decided to step in. He paid. They reached into the cage. And before anything could become something better… they snapped its neck. Just like that.

There wasn’t a pause. No ceremony. No hesitation. Just a sound, quick and final, the sound that doesn’t belong anywhere near something alive. And then… nothing. They handed it to him, like it was nothing, like the transaction had simply reached its natural conclusion. One moment it had been something alive in a cage and the next it was weight, just weight, held awkwardly in his hands as if he didn’t quite understand what he’d been given or what he was supposed to do next. No one else paused. No one looked twice. The market carried on around us. Water running, knives moving, voices calling out prices, this was just another exchange to them, another piece of food changing hands. And he just stood there with it, holding the thing he’d tried to save, now silent, now still, the intention still there in his hands but the life already gone.

You don’t say anything after something like that. Not really. You just stand there, holding whatever version of the world you had before and feeling it shift slightly out of place, like something’s been nudged and it’s never going to sit properly again. We walked on, because what else do you do, and that’s the part that stays with me. Not the act itself, not even the shock. It’s the walking on.

We didn’t talk about it. Not properly. There were a few half-sentences, a couple of “fuck…” under the breath, the kind of words people throw out when they don’t know where to put what they’ve just seen, and then silence. Not the peaceful kind. The heavy kind. The kind that seems to sit in your chest like you swallowed something you shouldn’t have and it’s just… there, refusing to move.

Travel lies to you. It tells you you’re open-minded, that you’re ready to see the world as it is, that you can handle truth in all its forms because you’ve read enough, watched enough, known enough. But knowing isn’t the same as standing there. Knowing is safe. Knowing is clean. Knowing lives behind a screen where you can scroll past it, close the tab, go and make a coffee. Standing there is different. Standing there means you don’t get to look away fast enough. It means the sound stays. It means the moment doesn’t buffer or soften or ask if you’re still watching. It just happens. And you’re in it.

I knew dog meat existed. Of course I did. Everyone does. It’s one of those things filed away under uncomfortable truths, alongside a hundred other things the world quietly runs on. But I didn’t know it. Not like that. Not until there was a cage, not until there were eyes looking back, not until there was a hand, a movement, a sound that doesn’t belong anywhere near something alive. That’s the difference. That’s the line.

We walked on because there was nothing else to do, and that’s the part that eats at you. You like to think you’d do something, say something, be something better in that moment, but the truth is you don’t. You freeze. You process too slowly. You realise too late that the moment you thought you could change has already passed, and all you’re left with is the version of yourself that stood there and did nothing.

And then comes the guilt. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just quiet, persistent, the kind that taps you on the shoulder later when you’re back somewhere normal, somewhere clean, somewhere that smells like coffee instead of blood and water and heat. You start replaying it. What if we’d said something sooner? What if we hadn’t hesitated? What if we’d just done more? But it’s already over. It was always already over.

And beneath that guilt, something worse. Anger. Not at them. At yourself. For thinking, even for a second, that you could walk into a place like that, hand over a bit of cash, and rewrite the ending, like life works that way, like death negotiates, like the world bends because you decided, in that moment, to care.

It doesn’t. That’s the reality. Life and death aren’t clean. They’re not moral. They’re not shaped around what feels right to you. They just are. And sometimes they happen in places that don’t hide them, places that don’t package them up or move them behind closed doors or soften them with distance and convenience, places where it’s all just out in the open.

That market didn’t do anything unusual. That’s the part people don’t want to sit with. It wasn’t an exception. It wasn’t some horror story outside the norm. It was normal. Daily life. Food.

And that’s where it gets uncomfortable, because it forces you to look at the line you’ve drawn in your own head, what’s acceptable, what’s not, what you eat, what you love, what you refuse to think about, and you realise that line isn’t as solid as you thought it was. It shifts. It depends on where you are, what you’ve grown up with, what you’ve chosen not to question.

So before you get angry at me for telling this, before you decide what’s right, what’s wrong, what should or shouldn’t exist, just understand this: I didn’t go looking for this story. I didn’t want to write it. I’d rather it didn’t exist in my head at all.

But it does.

And pretending it doesn’t feels worse.

We left the market, carried on with the day, probably laughed at something later, had a beer, talked about where to go next, because that’s what you do. You keep moving.

But it stays. Not loud. Not constant. Just there, like a weight that doesn’t go away, like something you saw once, properly, and now you can’t unsee it.

And that’s it. No lesson. No clean ending. No way to tie it up and make it feel better.

Just a moment.

And the silence that followed it.

And if you’re angry now, reading this like I had anything to do with it, like I chose it or shaped it or could have rewritten it into something softer, just remember, I told you at the beginning. This isn’t a nice story. It wasn’t meant to be. It’s not something I condone, not something I’d ever choose to be part of, but it’s part of the world all the same. Life isn’t always packaged for comfort, especially not when you step outside your own version of it. Sometimes you see things you’d rather unsee, things that don’t fit neatly into what you believe is right or acceptable. That doesn’t make them disappear. It just means you’ve seen them properly now. And once you have, that’s yours to carry.