He sees the faces looking at him, then past him. The people around him are startled deer who shrink when confronted with his unswerving stare, the kind of stare that says, where am I who are you why are you looking at me?

He keeps his hands in his pockets, takes them out, puts them back in. Sighs, lets out a long breath.

Occasionally he looks around the corner, just to check that nobody is there.

It is time.

With that funny walk of his, the one that is all heels and toes, he slips through the crowd and around the winding streets, to the little apartment balconies with the hanging flowers in the alleyways. He feels an excitement that builds inside until his walk becomes a hopping skip and his hands start to shake.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

And it’s there.

He halts before the balcony at the end of the alley, looking up. The little old lady who lives there is out watering her potted flowers. Her slow, tottering gait takes her back to the screen door and she disappears back into her home. He shimmies his way up the stunted street tree growing beneath her window and grabs the rail of the balcony.

He’s been waiting all week to do this.

Carefully, as though approaching a holy totem, he slithers over the rail and kneels before the the potted prairie flowers, and almost reverentially, with a delicate motion as practised as a magician’s sleight-of-hand, he plucks a pebble from the terracotta.

In a blink, he has hopped back over the balcony, landing hard on the pavement, scrabbling hard to get away, one fist clenched tightly with the little pebble burning a hole in his palm. The smile cutting its way across his face does not belong on Earth. It does not belong anywhere.

The triumph of his accomplishment follows him all the way home to his dingy apartment and stays with him in his stolen dreams.