Running through the rain, he thought. Thought too much about nothing and too little about something. Running, running so fast, nobody could touch him. Hands could reach out, and wouldn’t even be able to grasp a thread off his trench coat. If you happened to be watching him, it would have all probably been in slow motion. He was just the kind of guy that looked like he belonged in a movie, and slow motion is always the way to create suspense in movies. But to be focusing on one man in one black trench coat in one crowded train station would have been quite a feet. Since this wasn’t in a movie, he wasn’t moving in slow motion. He was running, as stated before. But he was running unusually fast. Adding on the darkness of night and the torrential downpour, it would have been near impossible to follow this man with your eyes. Not being able to put him in movie slow motion made it that way.

Not that anybody would want to focus on this one man on this particular day. He was pretty average, he looked liked he was just running to catch a late night train, a thing not nearly that out of the ordinary. Most people would just casually glance by, maybe shift a little to the right to get out of his way for courteous reasons. He looked like he had somewhere to go, so it was the sensible thing to do. Not knowing why he was running so quickly was their blind spot though. What if they weren’t being courteous? What if he wanted- no, needed- to be stopped? However, most people don’t take the time to ponder those things, so the man was allowed to run and run and run for as long as he wanted…or needed. As each stepped to the side courteously, not one of them looked at him directly. And all those people-watchers that sit on the benches for entertainment didn’t watch him. Nobody saw him, nobody watched him.

I watched him. I watched that man run. I watched him hold a newspaper in his left hand crumpled up so it was barely legible. The New York Times. Monday, January 5th, 1942. I watched him jump a few inches over a dropped, forgotten crate. The crate once held oranges all the way from Georgia. I know, because I saw the poor runaway child who ate them all, and left the crate. The woman who dropped them won’t be mad though. She didn’t need them, she also brought up a lot more cratefuls of grapefruit and apples and all those other round fruit that fit nicely in wooden crates, from Georgia. She was wealthy enough to let the poor child have his fill for the day without even noticing her good deed.

None of that matters though, and it has nothing to do with the story. It doesn’t even take place in New York. And it certainly wasn’t 1942, or January for that matter. Nor was it a Monday. The poor child never again appears in the story, and neither does the Georgian woman. And I highly doubt oranges are repeated once more anywhere throughout this tale.