The Lost Child

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She likes to sit down by the docks in a place where sunlight can discover her face. Once there, she leans back and listens to the monotony of seawater lapping against the quayside, and she has no concept of the hour. She disturbs no one, but she hears footsteps passing in each direction. She is a woman in debt who can no longer find anyone willing to employ her at the loom; she is a diminished woman who, before her time, has yielded reluctantly to age and infirmity. They call her Crazy Woman, but she smiles and forgives them. It is spring, but winter is still in the air. She puts on a sad demeanour and fumbles at the hair buttons on her dark worn coat, and then she hears a penny drop into the box and she looks up and offers a toothless grin to the tall frock-coated man who is now walking away from her. She wants to tell the man that it hasn’t always been like this, truly it hasn’t. She wants to tell him, but to what purpose? The man wears a tight smirk of derision, which signals that he imagines himself more ingenious than anyone else, and who is she to argue? These are busy men. She hears the stiff wheels of a carriage turning laboriously against the cold flags and the noisy tattoo of horses clipping diligently towards their destinations. The incessant blasting of a ship’s horn disturbs her reverie, but the sluggish rhythm of burbling water eventually begins to lull her into the receptive arms of slumber.

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