Fragile

The streets are full of strange objects. As you pass through the world of normality, people shopping, working, rebuking their children in subtle undertones of authority, you’ll see all sorts of oddities.

If I kept lists I would have seen so far: a poker chip, a bus ticket with profanities written on the back, marbles that a child had lost (first one and then the other) and more I could no longer remember. Each time it happened I felt like I had discovered a mystery, encountering by chance an object out of its rightful place and time.

Charlotte picked up the penny for good luck and found a spider attached to the end of it dangling by a single thread from the blemished copper.

“Hello, little fella.”

She tried to disengage the spider slowly from the coin so as not to hurt it but instead it hurtled into the air in a terrible manner. Charlotte prayed it had reached the ground safely but her mind was full of dashed spiders limbs and spider brains splattered on the concrete.

“Charli!”

She rotated her head to see the source of the voice and recognised Will Hart from school. He waved at her and she to him and he skipped across the road, checking for cars before crossing.

“You look smart!”
“Yeah,” he replied, with a boyish grin. “I’m working as an engineering consultant over at that new company.”
“That’s good,” she said, genuinely pleased for him.
He grinned and then his eyes widened.
“What about you? What have you been up to?”
Apart from destroying spiders and picking up pennies…?
“Um, not much. I’ve started a new training course.”

In honesty, she didn’t know what to say when people asked her about her life. How could she possibly express the complexities of the last few years in a single conversation? She’d been in a place where jobs hadn’t existed; careers, social lives, money, they’d all disappeared from her. Now they returned they seemed alien, something that the world had burdened her with in early adulthood, to quell the innocent curiosity within her. She wondered why her thoughts seemed so different from everyone else’s, why simple things seemed grand while important things seemed arbitrary.

William chuckled at her drifting. He looked so grown up but there was a childishness about him, a sense of humour and depth.
“Sorry,” she said. “I do that all the time.”
“It’s alright. Hey, you wanna-, come for a drink with me?”
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
The part of Charlotte that been away from the everyday world was stunned. She had gone for so long in her own little world that anyone’s interest made her flail like the spider, clinging to the a forgotten penny only to be dashed away to the side.
“Okay.”
A mild tremble fluctuated over her as his eyes lit up. They turned and walked away together; unaware that one little spider, having survived its fall, was crawling its way along the clear path behind them.