Print

 If he found his way to the inn, he would have a very difficult night ahead. Being lost, for a change, was proving beneficial. Unable to see in the failing light and limping heavily, from an unexplained numbness in his leg, he found himself, after an hour of semi-diligent searching, in the square in which he started. A cavernous yawn in the city, surrounded by tall buildings that seemed to lean inward, it was a rather quaint park by day. As night set in, the tenants about the square lit lamps and candles that marked curtained boundaries about the square, sealing their boundaries with light. Ribbons of black draping the walls marked the roads.

He fumbled with the events of the day, trying haphazardly to reconstruct a route to the meeting, and his bed soon thereafter. Quickly, scenes in other towns, dreamt of long ago began to intrude and it was little work to concoct a path completely untenable.

- Pardon me, ma'am. He demanded of a passing child, mistaking him a small aging woman. Snapped by the effrontery, the child blistered his shin with a well aimed boot and scooted into the night.

He sat down on a bench and waited.  The pain in his leg, the numbness in the other, captivating him.  His finger gently pressing the flesh down each leg.  The next pedestrian found him fast asleep in a rather humorous position and quite oblivious.  His sleep interrupted, an ill-chosen word greeted the curious.

A passing constable soon helped him into the grand station, mere steps away. At the tip of the officer’s baton, he scrounged the coins for a one-way ticket to the next small burg in the mountains. As he stepped onto the train he watched the policeman wander through the thin crowd, whistling a few bars of some tune, repeatedly, each as unrecognizable as the one before.

The train whistled, for a town he had never seen, and he knew he would have a difficult day ahead.