One In a Hundred
The shriek of the alarm pierces the darkness.
Elise quickly forgets whatever dream she was having, shuddering as the muscles of her body tense in delayed shock. The soft serenity is quickly swept away by the harsh cold of the early morning and the instinctual urge to find and shut down that incessant racket.
She moans. The cold has penetrated her sheets while she’d slept and slowly but persistently seeped through her flesh and down to her bones. She dreads even reaching an arm up as far as her bedside table to shut her phone’s annoyingly joyous melody up.
Alas, she must force herself. She must go on. Elise is a busy woman, and these are busy days. She, along with her fellow students, aspires to great heights, and great heights can only be achieved by a great deal of work and sacrifice.
Project what you want unto the Universe, and the Universe shall reflect it back….in its own time…with its own unique manner…and such.
Her phone beeps and shudders under the strain of receiving the first message of the day while she runs the shower. Eager though she is to tear off her cumbersome night socks, tracksuit pants and jumper, all of which have begun to feel like the source of the cold which numbs her nose and causes her to hunch over, and jump into that small shaft of wet warmth, she abandons it and dashes from her little bathroom into the living room of the little flat where the phone awaits, now on her kitchen bench.
It’s a message from Michael. A dear friend, whom she endeavors to see once a month either over lunch or dinner.
“Good morning! Want to grab dinner tonight?”
With both thumbs, somewhat labored by their lack of blood, and ignoring the sharp pang of frustration briefly surfacing inside her, she quickly types a return message; “Michael! How are you darling? I work Thursday evenings. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Though she has told him a thousand times, and in fact went to dinner with him to celebrate the fact that she’d be working a steady shift of Thursday nights, in addition to her Sunday, Monday and Tuesday shifts, she immediately feels a surge of regret to have been so abrupt with him, and quickly follows with another message before dashing off to her shower: “How’s quitting smoking going?”
He’s too polite to remind her that he never smoked.
She’s wet just long enough to warm her insides before stepping back into the freezer that planet Earth has become and dries herself with haste and is dressed in her tightest jeans and her thickest hoodie and her favorite finger-less gloves and her face is adequately painted to hide whatever of her years or trials are written thereon before grabbing her books and dashing to her little car.
Of course she forgot her handbag, in which her car keys live.
Had she brought her keys, and perhaps forgot her books instead, she could have left the engine running while she went to get them, and car might have been heated by the time she got back, or so she chides herself.
While she waits for her car to thaw her phone alerts her again. Another message inviting her to another thing with another person: Valerie.
She frowns; isn’t Valerie in Thailand?
While the windscreen slowly defrosts she checks Valerie’s profile. No Thailand pictures. Maybe Christie was in Thailand? She checks; yes, it was Christie.
Christie and her new boyfriend Matt…no, Kyle!
Gently the thought of replying to Valerie slips beyond her periphery, as she realizes her windscreen is now clear.
Nine AM class. One hour’s drive away. Rising before the sun was necessary, however, for she must stop at Coffee Snobs for her morning coffee. They make the best coffee. The line is often long and at times the parking difficult to negotiate. But they make the very best coffee.
Another message while waiting in line. It’s from Bec. It’s a picture of George sleeping in her bed. For a moment a tense thrill runs through her; Bec has had a crush on George since they met, and she’s more than due for some of the good vibes she sends out to come back to her. She quickly writes her congratulations and jokes about her friend being a naughty girl in response before ordering her coffee.
The sun has cast its pure light over the dewy winter morning by the time Elise arrives on campus. She is greeted by a distraught Rachel, who quickly tells her that a slut named Bec has hooked up with George even though she knew Rachel has had a crush on him since they met.
Elise quickly re-calibrates what she knows of the situation into the correct order and consoles her friend before leaving her on the bench to attend class and promising to catch up with her for comfort drinks soon. In class she sees Bec, who has just enough time in which to compress many a sordid detail of her previous night with a guy she just met named George and how he’d mentioned that he knows Elise before the teacher arrives. Under her breath Bec then inquires as to Elise’s trip to Thailand, and Elise gently reminds her that this was Valerie who went to Thailand.
When finally class is dismissed Elise does as she always does; she makes a direct line for the bench seats which surround the statue in the courtyard. She is unique in this ritual, for nobody else ever sits at these benches beneath the statue. That the other students walk around it, instead of right into it, is the only indication that they are aware of its existence at all. Thus it seems a sort of haven to Elise, for though she has managed to acclimatize to the city’s blurred rush of passing hours and fiercely competitive work ethic, which necessitates not just drinking an excess of coffee but the finest of coffee for which the city is renowned, the chambers of her heart which she keeps ever to herself beat to a more serene tune. A whisper, rather than the obnoxious bellow necessary to be heard in a city which swallows the meek.
Unlike her friends, she is not from here; she grew up on a peaceful farm at the foot of the mountain range which flanked the golden south coast and where even the sharp winter breeze swept at such a sensual pace that it felt more of a refreshing caress than the harsh, sudden blast of arctic air which the greets the turn of the city’s seasons.
Ironically, this space right in the middle of the University’s courtyard is the quietest and stillest place in the whole town, and Elise loves nothing more than sitting within its protective barrier, around which the swarms of bodies pass with nary a stumble closer than the berth given by all, and without a coffee in her hand.
She’d read the plaque only once; the young man depicted in copper was some philanthropist who lived and died in a time immemorial but echoed through the ages with misty lensed romantic films and stylized fairy-tales. His name was Robert Ludlow. His body is long gone, dust into the earth as memories of his time unto eternity, but his likeness has stood for almost three hundred years. Very near to the day, in fact.
In fact, the very next day was the statue’s three hundredth birthday. Something Elise would have noticed had she held on to the earthy corner of her psyche which allowed her to drift off into the embrace of the clouds that she may gaze in wonderment at the stars and drift off upon the breeze to her waking dreamlands where every stone tells a story and every leaf floating on the peaceful waters has an origin and a destination. Alas, she has assimilated much of the mindset of those around her, in order that she may fit in and be alert and deserve all the good things her classmates deserve; a good career, a steady stream of romantic relationships until she finds the one into which she can settle with the least inconvenience, and access to quality, barista coffee and café focaccias on a regular basis. Not to mention the personal training sessions, twice a week, because a healthy body equates to a healthy mind you see, and one must be fit, as well as the yoga because one must be mindful and present at all times.
The whirlwind of things to do thus spirits her consciousness into harsh and frantic reality, and she reaches into her bag to check her personal planner, and confirm that today is Thursday and that she has one such personal training session tomorrow before class. As she does, Elise is ill prepared when she suddenly feels a smile being shone over her, and for one momentary lapse into the dreamlike realm of imagination which has been wilting beneath the bustling traffic of necessities all vying for her attention, she turns her eyes, longingly, toward the statue in response. An ever so slight but infinitely endearing and yet strangely melancholy puff of emotion reminds her that she still has some slight access to that limitless imagination she has almost drowned in frothy coffee as she looks up at Robert Ludlow, his soft, handsome face, looking sternly off into the distant east to greet the sunrise upon the shore whence it wakes, seeming to beckon her off on some adventure into worlds she doesn’t have time to conjure between doing lunch and doing yoga…
“Hey!” the voice of Michael interrupts her daydream and shocks her back to the true source of the smile; he’s standing in front of her.
“Hey darling!” she responds, quickly pulling her planner the rest of the way out of her bag and opening it across her lap. “How are you? I just have to do this. How are you going?”
“I’m good,” Michael confirms, raising three fingers, “three weeks now, no smoking.”
“Oh, good on you!” she says, and sees that today is Thursday and that she has a six AM session with Toni tomorrow before class. “Sorry about tonight.”
“What’s tonight?” he asks.
She puts the planner away and rises, stretching her arms out and giving him an affectionate kiss on the corner of his lips, followed by a close hug. “Dinner.”
“Oh, that’s alright.” Michael says as they part, brow furrowed, not that she notices.
“I have to walk,” she says, remembering her coffee date with Ashley which she spotted when she’d checked her planner, and pointing.
“Yep, I’m that way,” he says, and they walk together.
“Have you heard from Christie and Matt?” she asks, curious about the new couple’s first holiday together.
“Is Christie dating Matt?” he asks, shocked.
“Yeah, they went to Thailand together.”
“No, that was Rachel and Kyle.”
She is about to inform him that she just saw Rachel this morning, when a voice cuts her off, shouted by an intercepting Paul.
“Hey, Paul,” the boy she thinks is Paul says as he points over their heads, “the room got changed.”
“Oh, okay,” Michael, or as Paul called him Paul, says, before quickly turning back to Elise, “I’ll see you soon, Bec.”
“Yeah, talk soon,” she says.
“Sorry, I forgot you’re working tonight,” Paul, or probably Michael, says to her.
“That’s alright,” Elise shrugs.
“Cool, message me.”
“Me too.”
“Bye.”
They head their separate ways and keep their separate dates until night falls, and Elise goes to work and serves the coffee the wishes she could buy without ever even knowing how it’s made, and then makes her long way back to her otherwise empty apartment, where she slaves over her calendar for another hour, all the while responding to messages requesting her company at this or that event or for a chat and catch up with whomsoever, before crawling, well and truly spent, into bed.
Then, at the stroke of midnight, in the courtyard of the university, Robert Ludlow, who knew all the world and all its corners and all its secrets and saw all its fancies and tasted all its tastes and walked all its roads and sailed all its seas, but never once knew the wonder of true love, steps down from upon his pedestal, and sets off to find it in the next twenty-four hours, lest he once again must return to his tiny prison where he lives in plain sight and yet is invisible to all.
Training takes place at the foreshore, and in the king of foggy cold which leaps down the throat and stabs at the lungs from every angle, poor Elise had met Toni that morning and began what turned out to be another grueling series of sprints and lunges and burpies and squats and runs and lifts and so on.
But she’s investing in good vibrations. Her fellow students had awoken her to the presence of the universe, and that negative things only happen because negative thoughts are reflected back, and so if positive thoughts are thought, positive events will take place.
Of course this had led her to wonder whether children sold into slavery at birth in Uganda were able to conjure such negative energies in utero…
…as well as where Stephen Hawking factors in to their belief that a healthy body equates to a healthy mind…
…but she’s too busy to consider these things now. She’s just finished her training and subsequent pace around in waist-deep water, which is actually a method of torture in some ancient cultures, but which is good for her apparently, and is now aching for that coffee with Crystal she had arranged.
Poor Crystal; unlucky in love. Now Bec has gone and swept George right out from under her.
A male jogger approaches and hits on her and she gives him her number because he has nice arms and a sparkly smile.
As the sun reaches toward hour nine, she meets with Crystal, who proceeds to let a load off but it’s not about George; it’s about Allen, a forty year old drummer in a pub band who lives at home, has two kids to an ex-wife and is an alcoholic, but who twenty-one year old Crystal had shared an intense relationship with for three years and, two years later, is not quite over it.
Elise recites, between blocks of repetitive babbling, the assurance that if she couldn’t help him in three years, she couldn’t help him in a lifetime, and Crystal insists that he was a wonderful man and that she made a great step mother, and Elise hugs her and then remembers it was Rachel who lucked out with George. Then a slight tinge of jealousy that Crystal could have had such great sex that it’s made her insane before her eleven thirty class and then lunch with Michael and then coffee with Allen and an afternoon class and then work and then drinks with the jogger which she proceeds to cue up in the brief intervals between all this…
…and the bench, of course. Somewhere between a class ending and some other engagement beginning, Elise finds time to make her beeline back to that bench. But with so much going on, she fails to realize that the statue it flanks is missing.
Well, not missing, rather right beside her, in full flesh and blood form.
She’s buried in her phone, as Robert Ludlow had noticed people becoming more and more over the past few decades, but he knows who she is, and he senses the vast, vivid heart and nebulous imagination flickering behind those hardened eyes, and for a moment hope springs like a cool stream that this wanderer, with her loner’s soul encumbered by the need to belong, might be the one.
He’d spent the day feeling no more visible than had he been a wisp of vapor, but for the odd random glare warning him to stay well back.
He needs only her promise that she’ll see him beyond today, for him to be granted a stay of continuing his sentience. He manages to say hello. She smiles and says hello back. He stares deeply, longing for his gaze to reach the quarter of her mind, from which she often detaches, which still believes in magic, and which had observed with that enchanting wonder his long-standing likeness.
They talk more, engaging each other, she stolen from her phone, he awash in the sweet stream of hope.
She rubs his arm. She pats his thigh. She calls him ‘darling’ again and again. She maintains that irritating façade of metropolitan elegance stubbornly and strongly.
Then, for one moment, one which causes a hot ripple to rush through his heart, her gaze narrows unto his own, and her expression intensifies, and he seems to have gotten through, and she seems to be reaching him, and her neck tenses so to carry her eyes toward his empty pedestal…
“Elise,” a voice snatches her, and Michael approaches.
“Hello darling!” she cries, and they embrace from the waist up, and exchange dainty kisses though he obviously longs for one deeper, and they walk off, and Elise has just as quickly forgotten about the boy named Robert who’d been sitting beside her.
Dates are kept. Coffee is drunk. Fitness is maintained. Jobs are attended. Then, in the middle of the night, Robert Ludlow sighs as he returns to his post, wistfully telling himself that maybe in another hundred years, his luck will have improved.
THE END
Elise quickly forgets whatever dream she was having, shuddering as the muscles of her body tense in delayed shock. The soft serenity is quickly swept away by the harsh cold of the early morning and the instinctual urge to find and shut down that incessant racket.
She moans. The cold has penetrated her sheets while she’d slept and slowly but persistently seeped through her flesh and down to her bones. She dreads even reaching an arm up as far as her bedside table to shut her phone’s annoyingly joyous melody up.
Alas, she must force herself. She must go on. Elise is a busy woman, and these are busy days. She, along with her fellow students, aspires to great heights, and great heights can only be achieved by a great deal of work and sacrifice.
Project what you want unto the Universe, and the Universe shall reflect it back….in its own time…with its own unique manner…and such.
Her phone beeps and shudders under the strain of receiving the first message of the day while she runs the shower. Eager though she is to tear off her cumbersome night socks, tracksuit pants and jumper, all of which have begun to feel like the source of the cold which numbs her nose and causes her to hunch over, and jump into that small shaft of wet warmth, she abandons it and dashes from her little bathroom into the living room of the little flat where the phone awaits, now on her kitchen bench.
It’s a message from Michael. A dear friend, whom she endeavors to see once a month either over lunch or dinner.
“Good morning! Want to grab dinner tonight?”
With both thumbs, somewhat labored by their lack of blood, and ignoring the sharp pang of frustration briefly surfacing inside her, she quickly types a return message; “Michael! How are you darling? I work Thursday evenings. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Though she has told him a thousand times, and in fact went to dinner with him to celebrate the fact that she’d be working a steady shift of Thursday nights, in addition to her Sunday, Monday and Tuesday shifts, she immediately feels a surge of regret to have been so abrupt with him, and quickly follows with another message before dashing off to her shower: “How’s quitting smoking going?”
He’s too polite to remind her that he never smoked.
She’s wet just long enough to warm her insides before stepping back into the freezer that planet Earth has become and dries herself with haste and is dressed in her tightest jeans and her thickest hoodie and her favorite finger-less gloves and her face is adequately painted to hide whatever of her years or trials are written thereon before grabbing her books and dashing to her little car.
Of course she forgot her handbag, in which her car keys live.
Had she brought her keys, and perhaps forgot her books instead, she could have left the engine running while she went to get them, and car might have been heated by the time she got back, or so she chides herself.
While she waits for her car to thaw her phone alerts her again. Another message inviting her to another thing with another person: Valerie.
She frowns; isn’t Valerie in Thailand?
While the windscreen slowly defrosts she checks Valerie’s profile. No Thailand pictures. Maybe Christie was in Thailand? She checks; yes, it was Christie.
Christie and her new boyfriend Matt…no, Kyle!
Gently the thought of replying to Valerie slips beyond her periphery, as she realizes her windscreen is now clear.
Nine AM class. One hour’s drive away. Rising before the sun was necessary, however, for she must stop at Coffee Snobs for her morning coffee. They make the best coffee. The line is often long and at times the parking difficult to negotiate. But they make the very best coffee.
Another message while waiting in line. It’s from Bec. It’s a picture of George sleeping in her bed. For a moment a tense thrill runs through her; Bec has had a crush on George since they met, and she’s more than due for some of the good vibes she sends out to come back to her. She quickly writes her congratulations and jokes about her friend being a naughty girl in response before ordering her coffee.
The sun has cast its pure light over the dewy winter morning by the time Elise arrives on campus. She is greeted by a distraught Rachel, who quickly tells her that a slut named Bec has hooked up with George even though she knew Rachel has had a crush on him since they met.
Elise quickly re-calibrates what she knows of the situation into the correct order and consoles her friend before leaving her on the bench to attend class and promising to catch up with her for comfort drinks soon. In class she sees Bec, who has just enough time in which to compress many a sordid detail of her previous night with a guy she just met named George and how he’d mentioned that he knows Elise before the teacher arrives. Under her breath Bec then inquires as to Elise’s trip to Thailand, and Elise gently reminds her that this was Valerie who went to Thailand.
When finally class is dismissed Elise does as she always does; she makes a direct line for the bench seats which surround the statue in the courtyard. She is unique in this ritual, for nobody else ever sits at these benches beneath the statue. That the other students walk around it, instead of right into it, is the only indication that they are aware of its existence at all. Thus it seems a sort of haven to Elise, for though she has managed to acclimatize to the city’s blurred rush of passing hours and fiercely competitive work ethic, which necessitates not just drinking an excess of coffee but the finest of coffee for which the city is renowned, the chambers of her heart which she keeps ever to herself beat to a more serene tune. A whisper, rather than the obnoxious bellow necessary to be heard in a city which swallows the meek.
Unlike her friends, she is not from here; she grew up on a peaceful farm at the foot of the mountain range which flanked the golden south coast and where even the sharp winter breeze swept at such a sensual pace that it felt more of a refreshing caress than the harsh, sudden blast of arctic air which the greets the turn of the city’s seasons.
Ironically, this space right in the middle of the University’s courtyard is the quietest and stillest place in the whole town, and Elise loves nothing more than sitting within its protective barrier, around which the swarms of bodies pass with nary a stumble closer than the berth given by all, and without a coffee in her hand.
She’d read the plaque only once; the young man depicted in copper was some philanthropist who lived and died in a time immemorial but echoed through the ages with misty lensed romantic films and stylized fairy-tales. His name was Robert Ludlow. His body is long gone, dust into the earth as memories of his time unto eternity, but his likeness has stood for almost three hundred years. Very near to the day, in fact.
In fact, the very next day was the statue’s three hundredth birthday. Something Elise would have noticed had she held on to the earthy corner of her psyche which allowed her to drift off into the embrace of the clouds that she may gaze in wonderment at the stars and drift off upon the breeze to her waking dreamlands where every stone tells a story and every leaf floating on the peaceful waters has an origin and a destination. Alas, she has assimilated much of the mindset of those around her, in order that she may fit in and be alert and deserve all the good things her classmates deserve; a good career, a steady stream of romantic relationships until she finds the one into which she can settle with the least inconvenience, and access to quality, barista coffee and café focaccias on a regular basis. Not to mention the personal training sessions, twice a week, because a healthy body equates to a healthy mind you see, and one must be fit, as well as the yoga because one must be mindful and present at all times.
The whirlwind of things to do thus spirits her consciousness into harsh and frantic reality, and she reaches into her bag to check her personal planner, and confirm that today is Thursday and that she has one such personal training session tomorrow before class. As she does, Elise is ill prepared when she suddenly feels a smile being shone over her, and for one momentary lapse into the dreamlike realm of imagination which has been wilting beneath the bustling traffic of necessities all vying for her attention, she turns her eyes, longingly, toward the statue in response. An ever so slight but infinitely endearing and yet strangely melancholy puff of emotion reminds her that she still has some slight access to that limitless imagination she has almost drowned in frothy coffee as she looks up at Robert Ludlow, his soft, handsome face, looking sternly off into the distant east to greet the sunrise upon the shore whence it wakes, seeming to beckon her off on some adventure into worlds she doesn’t have time to conjure between doing lunch and doing yoga…
“Hey!” the voice of Michael interrupts her daydream and shocks her back to the true source of the smile; he’s standing in front of her.
“Hey darling!” she responds, quickly pulling her planner the rest of the way out of her bag and opening it across her lap. “How are you? I just have to do this. How are you going?”
“I’m good,” Michael confirms, raising three fingers, “three weeks now, no smoking.”
“Oh, good on you!” she says, and sees that today is Thursday and that she has a six AM session with Toni tomorrow before class. “Sorry about tonight.”
“What’s tonight?” he asks.
She puts the planner away and rises, stretching her arms out and giving him an affectionate kiss on the corner of his lips, followed by a close hug. “Dinner.”
“Oh, that’s alright.” Michael says as they part, brow furrowed, not that she notices.
“I have to walk,” she says, remembering her coffee date with Ashley which she spotted when she’d checked her planner, and pointing.
“Yep, I’m that way,” he says, and they walk together.
“Have you heard from Christie and Matt?” she asks, curious about the new couple’s first holiday together.
“Is Christie dating Matt?” he asks, shocked.
“Yeah, they went to Thailand together.”
“No, that was Rachel and Kyle.”
She is about to inform him that she just saw Rachel this morning, when a voice cuts her off, shouted by an intercepting Paul.
“Hey, Paul,” the boy she thinks is Paul says as he points over their heads, “the room got changed.”
“Oh, okay,” Michael, or as Paul called him Paul, says, before quickly turning back to Elise, “I’ll see you soon, Bec.”
“Yeah, talk soon,” she says.
“Sorry, I forgot you’re working tonight,” Paul, or probably Michael, says to her.
“That’s alright,” Elise shrugs.
“Cool, message me.”
“Me too.”
“Bye.”
They head their separate ways and keep their separate dates until night falls, and Elise goes to work and serves the coffee the wishes she could buy without ever even knowing how it’s made, and then makes her long way back to her otherwise empty apartment, where she slaves over her calendar for another hour, all the while responding to messages requesting her company at this or that event or for a chat and catch up with whomsoever, before crawling, well and truly spent, into bed.
Then, at the stroke of midnight, in the courtyard of the university, Robert Ludlow, who knew all the world and all its corners and all its secrets and saw all its fancies and tasted all its tastes and walked all its roads and sailed all its seas, but never once knew the wonder of true love, steps down from upon his pedestal, and sets off to find it in the next twenty-four hours, lest he once again must return to his tiny prison where he lives in plain sight and yet is invisible to all.
Training takes place at the foreshore, and in the king of foggy cold which leaps down the throat and stabs at the lungs from every angle, poor Elise had met Toni that morning and began what turned out to be another grueling series of sprints and lunges and burpies and squats and runs and lifts and so on.
But she’s investing in good vibrations. Her fellow students had awoken her to the presence of the universe, and that negative things only happen because negative thoughts are reflected back, and so if positive thoughts are thought, positive events will take place.
Of course this had led her to wonder whether children sold into slavery at birth in Uganda were able to conjure such negative energies in utero…
…as well as where Stephen Hawking factors in to their belief that a healthy body equates to a healthy mind…
…but she’s too busy to consider these things now. She’s just finished her training and subsequent pace around in waist-deep water, which is actually a method of torture in some ancient cultures, but which is good for her apparently, and is now aching for that coffee with Crystal she had arranged.
Poor Crystal; unlucky in love. Now Bec has gone and swept George right out from under her.
A male jogger approaches and hits on her and she gives him her number because he has nice arms and a sparkly smile.
As the sun reaches toward hour nine, she meets with Crystal, who proceeds to let a load off but it’s not about George; it’s about Allen, a forty year old drummer in a pub band who lives at home, has two kids to an ex-wife and is an alcoholic, but who twenty-one year old Crystal had shared an intense relationship with for three years and, two years later, is not quite over it.
Elise recites, between blocks of repetitive babbling, the assurance that if she couldn’t help him in three years, she couldn’t help him in a lifetime, and Crystal insists that he was a wonderful man and that she made a great step mother, and Elise hugs her and then remembers it was Rachel who lucked out with George. Then a slight tinge of jealousy that Crystal could have had such great sex that it’s made her insane before her eleven thirty class and then lunch with Michael and then coffee with Allen and an afternoon class and then work and then drinks with the jogger which she proceeds to cue up in the brief intervals between all this…
…and the bench, of course. Somewhere between a class ending and some other engagement beginning, Elise finds time to make her beeline back to that bench. But with so much going on, she fails to realize that the statue it flanks is missing.
Well, not missing, rather right beside her, in full flesh and blood form.
She’s buried in her phone, as Robert Ludlow had noticed people becoming more and more over the past few decades, but he knows who she is, and he senses the vast, vivid heart and nebulous imagination flickering behind those hardened eyes, and for a moment hope springs like a cool stream that this wanderer, with her loner’s soul encumbered by the need to belong, might be the one.
He’d spent the day feeling no more visible than had he been a wisp of vapor, but for the odd random glare warning him to stay well back.
He needs only her promise that she’ll see him beyond today, for him to be granted a stay of continuing his sentience. He manages to say hello. She smiles and says hello back. He stares deeply, longing for his gaze to reach the quarter of her mind, from which she often detaches, which still believes in magic, and which had observed with that enchanting wonder his long-standing likeness.
They talk more, engaging each other, she stolen from her phone, he awash in the sweet stream of hope.
She rubs his arm. She pats his thigh. She calls him ‘darling’ again and again. She maintains that irritating façade of metropolitan elegance stubbornly and strongly.
Then, for one moment, one which causes a hot ripple to rush through his heart, her gaze narrows unto his own, and her expression intensifies, and he seems to have gotten through, and she seems to be reaching him, and her neck tenses so to carry her eyes toward his empty pedestal…
“Elise,” a voice snatches her, and Michael approaches.
“Hello darling!” she cries, and they embrace from the waist up, and exchange dainty kisses though he obviously longs for one deeper, and they walk off, and Elise has just as quickly forgotten about the boy named Robert who’d been sitting beside her.
Dates are kept. Coffee is drunk. Fitness is maintained. Jobs are attended. Then, in the middle of the night, Robert Ludlow sighs as he returns to his post, wistfully telling himself that maybe in another hundred years, his luck will have improved.
THE END
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