Lost And Found

• Emily Harper, Grade 11, O'Connor Catholic College
• Short Story
• 2015

Excellence Award in the 'The Write Track 2015' competition

Beneath the twilight veil hid a man of little consequence, whose eyes were moons that glimmered palely in the sleepy silence. The city, whose sky wept frozen tears, was oblivious to the straw-haired wanderer who slinked from shadow to shadow and could not be heard over the wind. It was a truth that he was lonely, and it was another that his face had not known a smile for many weary months, but it was a lie that he wished things to be different. Tattooed on his arms were reasons why loneliness was preferable, and they were secrets he would never divulge, not even to his own mind that knew the crevices of his pain better than any.

They did not acknowledge him as he passed by; he was rather like a shadow himself and something in the way he walked demanded he be left alone. They glanced, maybe, if ever his cloak of darkness must be shed, but often they just clinked their teacups and laughed merrily as he glided round, blissful in their oblivion. He didn’t mind. Adults noticed not much of anything, wrapped as they were in the tight embrace of their own selves – they indulged in little else.

He had often wondered where he was going, or indeed if he was going anywhere. Usually he would alternate between corners of the city depending on what took his fancy. But on this particular night, in which the wind that had tormented the city nightly for the past week had lessened its wrath to a rainy breeze, his feet turned him left at the corner where the Italian restaurant was situated – you know the one. This street, narrow in width and rather unambitious, was as unknown to him as he was to the world. His eyes were more lost rather than found as they flickered between an abandoned shop on one side and a derelict apartment building on the other in much the same fashion as the street’s only light source.

It was while his gaze travelled uncertainly around this dimly lit Nowhere that he spotted a curled ball of a human, covered in ripped rags that served neither warmth nor purpose other than the comfort of not being entirely exposed to the night. Wispy hair that might have been blonde had it not been so filthy poked out from the top of the ‘blanket’, so subtly it was probably accidental. And then he stumbled. He had not made such a loud noise since Before, and immediately he seemed to draw within himself, his eyes squinting shut in terror at the chaos he would soon remember. But a cough broke through the reeling pain, so soft he could have imagined it but loud enough that he knew he didn’t.

And her eyes were lost, too. But as they met his and their gaze held, secrets and pasts and unspoken yet understood things travelling between them, somehow, they both became a little less lost and a little more found.