Bert remained motionless in his vomit green sedan for what felt like hours but was significantly closer to 35 minutes. As much as being miserably still felt appropriate for his current mood, he couldn’t help but start to feel an itch on his nose. If he moved to scratch the itch he probably wouldn’t be able to manifest this ‘empty shell of a person’ thing he was going for right now. But his nose was really itching. This really was not ideal. He tried to memorise the exact position of all his limbs so if he went to scratch his nose he could return to this precise shape of comfort and misery. He lifted his head and moved his arm around to scratch his nose. Sweet relief. Bert returned to the pose but now it didn’t feel right. Was his left arm on top of his right arm before or was it the other way around? Well now neither felt right. This seemed unfair, all he wanted was to look as broken as he felt. He shifted around uncomfortably a few more times. Tried a few positions for a couple of minutes at a time but couldn’t slide back into the comfortable one he was in before. “Dammit God!” he shouted to his steering as he snapped up right. Bert wasn’t particularly good at feeling sorry for himself. He hadn’t really had any practice. He did get the feeling that however you were meant to do it, he was doing it wrong. He abandoned the endeavour and turned his car lights on preparing to drive home and maybe practice a bit more when he got home. As he switched the lights on, the words “Keep going” lit up in front of him. He read the words out to himself. “Keep going…. Keep going”, he continued to mutter the words on repeat attaching more meaning to them each time he repeated them.

“Keep going! I need to keep going. But keep going with what? Maybe my purpose is something grander that begins with picking up that cardboard! So… picking up cardboard? Recycling? No, I’m bigger than that. What about helping people? Yes! My purpose must be to help people! This must be a sign!”

Bert was correct that this was a sign, but more in the traditional sense in that it was telling cars to keep going past the new construction, and less so in the existential sense that it was telling specifically Bert what to do. It was directed more specifically at Bert a few minutes later when Bert was required to keep going so as to leave the carpark. This meaning however, was somewhat lost on Bert as he was a bit too soaked up on the existential meaning to take into account the real meaning and got lost in the car park for several minutes. Had he parked on the other side of the car park he would have instead been met with the sign “Be prepared to stop” which would have been much more applicable to his current situation. But nevertheless, Bert had taken his message and was going to run with it.

….

“Okay, so helping people, what does that mean? '' Bert pondered as he looked over his white board. He had drawn the words “Helping people” in the centre with a circle around it. This was a good start, he told himself. “So what counts as helping people?”

“What about mowing my lawn?” Delinda piped up from another room.

Delinda had a lot more experience helping people than Bert, so he figured he could use the advice of his mother. He had invited her under the pretense of dinner, like he always did when he needed something. Delinda had heard the story of his purpose and secretly doubted there was more to it than what had already happened. She had never heard of someone having a purpose that required more work after the sensation, but she figured it couldn’t hurt for Bert to try helping people. It did mean however that she wasn’t taking this quite as seriously as Bert wanted her to, but then again, she never did.

“You don’t even have a lawn” Bert returned, with the slightest touch of frustration.

“But if I did, would you mow it?”

“Does it matter right now?”

“Okay so how about I grow a lawn, and then you can come over and mow it and then we can call it a day?” The secret joy Delinda had watching her son get flustered with her was one of the few reasons she wasn’t in too much of a hurry to join her late husband.

“Mum, can you please take this seriously, this might be one of the most important conversations in history, okay?”

“Okay Bert, well how about picking up litter? That’s helpful.”

“Mum, it’s me. If I was some regular schmuck maybe picking up litter might be it, but it’s me. My purpose must be big. I was your purpose, so mine must be like to help literally half the world or something. Maybe I need to end world hunger.”

“Okay so volunteer at a homeless shelter? That’s feeding hungry people”

“No, you’re not getting it, I’m not just going to feed like several people, that’s small scale, I mean completely end world hunger big scale.”

“Okay so why don’t you put end world hunger on the whiteboard”

“Because I don’t know where to start with that.”

“Well you could start by volunteering at a homeless shelter.” Delinda responded smartly.

Bert looked at his mother for a couple seconds with the familiar faint throb of frustration in the back of his brain reserved specifically for interactions with her.

“Okay, thanks for your input I can take it from here” Bert grumbled while packing up his whiteboard.

“Oh Bert, come on, don’t be like that” Delinda reacted, knowing very well being like that was what Bert did best.

“This is important to me mum, I really want to get this right.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, it’s just that, have you considered whether this is a road worth going down? Maybe you’ve done what you need to do and you can focus on yourself a bit now. You’re a lovely young man and you could have a great life if you focused on what you wanted to do, not what you expect from yourself” She said gently, trying to ease Bert into accepting his purpose is done. This only seemed to fortify his beliefs however.

“It’s not what I expect from myself! It’s what the world expects from me! It’s what the world needs from me! There was a sign, Mum !” Bert said, raising his voice a touch

“What was the sign?” Delinda inquired.

“It was a ‘keep going’ sign in front of my car! It was telling me to keep going with this purpose!”

“A road sign? I see six of them a day. If I took every road sign as gospel I’d be protesting for anarchy every time I saw a keep left sign. I wouldn’t have made it tonight If I read too much into the first red light I ran into on my way here.” Delinda responded, starting to grow exasperated herself.

“Well maybe that was a sign you shouldn’t have come to talk me out of this” Bert retorted.

“Now you’re the one being silly. When have you ever heard of someone needing to put work into their purpose, it just happens! It's not some weird project!” She responded, trying to maintain a reasonable tone.

“When have you ever heard of someone having their purpose be as menial as picking up a piece of trash? Maybe my purpose requires the work because it’s worth it!” Bert shouted back.

Delinda took in a deep breath. Taking a pause to de-escalate the conversation. She stood up and walked around the room for a minute before replying.

“Okay Bert, you’ve made your decision. I know better than to try and change your mind. Do what you need to do.”

“I will” Bert answered sternly, but also committing to dropping this argument.

The alarm Bert had set twenty minutes earlier chimed out to signify that the meat pie Bert had left in the fridge was now approximately below room temperature, for Delinda’s sake. She was not a fan of third degree burns, of which pies were notorious for. She liked her pies like she liked her men; chilled and safe. This idiosyncrasy meant a family tradition of cold pies.

Bert pulled the pie out of the fridge and set it down on the centre of the kitchen table. The below room temperature pie helped balance out the above room temperature argument they had been having, grounding them both.

“Okay let’s talk about something else” Delinda chimed, resuming her normal cheery tone.

“How’s the single life treating you?” Audible cracks could be heard as Bert’s furrowed brow unclenched to resume light-hearted conversation.

“Oh, very boring, your father’s absence is really quite boring. It turns out most of our board games require at least two players to work. Who would have thought?” She was mostly joking but Bert knew she definitely would’ve checked the box to see if she could play them by herself.

“Yeah, weird.” Bert rolled his eyes. “Have you given any thought about how you’re going to fill all your time?”

“Yeah I was thinking I might take up a new sport, like bowling or something.”

“I’ve always thought that I am pretty good at bowling but then every time I go bowling I do terribly and think to myself ‘hmm I’m usually pretty good at bowling, I must be having a bad game’ but upon reflection and confronted with so many occasions where this has happened I have been forced into the conclusion that maybe I’m just not that good at bowling.” Bert served Delinda and himself a cold piece of pie.

“You get that from me, which is why I think I’m going to really commit to trying to be a normal amount of good at bowling. I don’t want to be some bowling freak, just average or something. Enough that someone who doesn’t really play bowling would look and go ‘huh, you’re pretty good at this’ and I can sheepishly respond ‘yeah I guess’, you know what I mean?’” Delinda poked at the cold slice in front of her.

“Not really, but I’m willing to pretend to if that’s good enough for you?”

“Wouldn’t expect any less.”

Pleasant conversation continued till late into the night, neither of them returning to the subject of Bert’s purpose, but it remained in the forefront of his mind.

….

Bert spent all of Sunday planning how he would go about helping people. By now the whiteboard was looking a lot more filled out, with several arrows coming off the centre attaching to smaller circles containing words like “good” or “important”. It was all well and good to have these pleasant words involved in this brainstorm, but what he was really lacking was some verbs. This was problematic as doing-words tend to be the chief component of plans involving doing things. In fact, the only circle that had a verb in it apart from the centre one was a big bubbly circle coming off to the right which had ‘saving the world’ written in it with a couple of question marks at the end; The question marks being the operative part of the statement. He wasn’t exactly sure what the world needed saving from, but he was sure that if he did save the world that would certainly involve helping a lot of people. Bert tried to justify in his mind that this wasn’t reaching too far, analogising his mental gymnastics to the extension of the primordial arm of the first primate to begin life in the trees. However, when he tried to visualise this, his brain enthusiastically provided him with images of sloths confusing their arms for tree branches and falling to their deaths. The problem with really big exciting ideas is that they clutter out small, reasonable, achievable ideas. This wasn’t usually something Bert struggled with. Whenever he was designing new buildings at the firm he would always work through it slowly, layer by layer, planning the process through the eyes of the people who would need to build it. That’s when it struck him. He needed to start small and work his way up. His purpose had started out with picking up a piece of cardboard, so that was a small beginning for which he needed to work upwards. Picking up litter might be a good start, that was a small step up from picking up cardboard. A keen-eyed observer would note that this is precisely what his mother had suggested earlier. Bert had worked his way to the main point she was trying to make, but in words that she hadn’t used, so he could still justify that coming to this conclusion was the result of his intelligence, and not hers. He started writing out a list of things that would constitute helping people and organising a roster for the things he would try each day over the next few weeks. Picking up litter seemed like a good start, especially if he picked up litter somewhere important. He scrawled it in for Monday.

Bert tried to come up with important places that needed litter picked up. Unfortunately for Bert all his favourite places were usually the kind of places that were almost completely sterile. Bert tried to avoid places that weren’t. Although he would have loved to go pick up litter at the museum or the Senate, he mightn’t have enjoyed it very much had there been any litter there for him to be picking up. Over much umming and ahh-ing Bert eventually settled on the beach. Oceans are important, David Attenborough had told him so. As an added bonus there were low odds he would meet anyone he knew there as it was the middle of winter. He called up Miranda to explain that he would be taking some time off because of his purpose. He tried to keep it vague, so he wouldn’t have to lie to keep her from trying to visit or worse help, but she kept berating him with so many inquisitive questions that by the end he had explained that he was off on a sea voyage to the Bahamas to uncover the lost gold of an ancient Dutch King.

….

Day one of helping people began at the closest beach, which was still almost a 45-minute drive away. Bert was clad head to toe in enough rubber clothes to give him a passing resemblance to the Michelin man. He walked up and down the beach for almost an hour before he found a piece of litter worthy of being the first piece of trash he put in his trash-bag. No resolutely good feelings arose from the enterprise of putting this aesthetic garbage in his bag, but he only loosely hoped that he would feel something. He continued around the park picking up less and less visually appealing litter in his bag. T the day was nearly done but the beach actually looked worse than when he had started. By only removing the nice looking litter, he had left a monopoly of ugly looking litter to decide the beach’s image. Bert surveyed his work, and drove back home miserably. As he walked through his kitchen when he got back home he noticed his father’s portrait had fallen off the wall again and was lying face down on the floor. He examined the glass for cracks. Luckily it hadn’t shattered this time but slight cracks were forming in the centre. He made a mental note to replace the string at the back to something more substantial, but for now just hung it back up. He smiled back at his father’s beaming face, slightly improving his mood. Day two had a slightly less up-beat but also less discriminatory Bert get to work on the beach. Having a superiority complex over actual rubbish was not conducive to helping people. Bert sucked up his pride and got to work clearing out the kind of rubbish the rubbish he had picked up yesterday would consider the real rubbish. Just as Bert was kind of getting into the rhythm of the work he spotted something that would chill any professional introvert; people he recognised. Clara and Elsie were jogging along the beach and would soon hit his event horizon, at which point he would no longer be able to escape social interaction. His only solace was that they hadn’t spotted him yet, but they were fast approaching. Bert tried to avoid eye-contact in a way that made it look like wasn’t trying to avoid eye-contact and drawing attention to himself. He tried to remember where people normally looked when they weren’t trying to avoid looking at someone as they walked past. He was drawing a blank, he had absolutely no idea what direction he normally looked or where he had been looking for the past two days of walking he had been doing. As a last ditch effort he bent down to pretend to tie his shoes as they drew near. Bert was wearing gumboots.

“Bert?” Clara and Elsie had closed in on his position. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, hi guys… I was just um… dusting my shoes… they got some dust on them…”

“That might’ve been sand…because this is a beach… Are you okay?” Clara questioned.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

As a last ditch effort to escape Bert went for the tried and tested strategy; the fake phone call.

“Yeah I’m fine… sorry, ooh my phone's ringing sorry I have to take this.” Bert fumbled around to get through several layers of clothes to pull out his phone. He brought it up to his ear and started speaking into it.

“Oh, Hi mum, what’s that? Oh you need me to come ov-” Bert was cut off by the sound of his phone ringing. Startled, Bert jumped, almost dropping his phone. Clara and Elsie each raised a single sarcastic eyebrow. Bert mumbled something about ‘a bug or something’. He held the phone in his hand against his head and looked at each of them with a pained smile as he shrugged his shoulders as if to say “what a strange development”. Neither of them looked impressed. The phone rung loud in the dead air. Even the waves seemed to retreat from the painfully awkward scenes unfolding. Bert looked at them sheepishly before responding

“…Sorry, I uh… have to take this” Bert withdrew the phone from his head and tapped accept call and brought it back to his head, much like an idiot would do.

“Oh, hi mum…” Clara sighed, Elsie furrowed her brow, and they both cut their losses and jogged off.

The anatomy of Bert’s misery was similar to that of a child’s stomach; although he had already filled out the main compartment of misery storage yesterday, the dessert stomach of his unhappiness had found more room to store additional misery upon this encounter.

Bert continued picking up litter for another hour before deciding it was best to stop before the urge to throw himself into the trash bag overwhelmed him. Once he got home and crossed out picking up litter from his list. It was time to jump ahead on his roster and try something else. Day three was going to be a bit more hands off to give him a chance to recover. It mostly involved donating increasing amounts of money to various different charities. Burning through his bank account was almost as painful as seeing Clara and Elsie the previous day but he persevered in the hope this would count as his purpose. He took regular breaks to see if he felt anything at all but to no avail. He crossed off donating to charities once his wallet felt considerably lighter. All his money was digitally stored of course but his wallet still felt lighter for some reason. This made him nervous. He stopped. Day four involved planting trees in a local park. He only made it until about 11am before he decided it wasn’t working. Day five involved making care packages for kids in other under-developed countries, this went slightly better. He almost felt like he was doing purposeful work for a while but he was just confusing it with the good feelings associated with helping other people. When he reached this conclusion he bitterly gave up and crossed it off the list.

The week was coming to an end and still no success. He would occasionally think back to what his mum had said. It was true that he had never heard of anyone whose purpose required this much work, but he couldn’t bear to think that his purpose was so menial. When these thoughts arrived, his brain fought back with fierce counter-attacks, pushing them out. He did eventually accept one of his mother’s ideas and added helping out at a homeless shelter to his roster with a furrowed brow. As a moral booster he threw out the previous week’s roster to pretend like he was starting fresh. This boost only survived for the time it took for him to get from his house to the shelter. The prospect of actual physical labour made him feel unhappy again. It was a large open building filled with dedicated volunteers and down-on-their luck have-nots. Bert was neither and made a conscious effort to present himself as such. He approached the counter to talk to whoever was in charge. The person in charge revealed themselves to be a cheery elderly woman in an office on the second floor of the big complex. She was talking to a younger man in an assortment of mismatching clothes that were clearly picked out with some effort as there was a certain charm in their assembly. Bert hovered awkwardly beside the man in an effort to prompt the woman to give him his full attention without needing to directly interrupt.

“Can I help you?” The woman asked cheerfully.

“Actually I’m going to be the one helping you. I’m going to volunteer here, I think it’s my purpose!” Bert replied self righteously.

The lady eyed Bert up and down, concealing a wince.

“Oh that’s okay, we don’t need another volunteer right now.”

Bert was taken aback by her lack of enthusiasm. After a brief pause to regain his sensibilities he retorted.

“You’re a shelter, how can you not need volunteers? I’m here to help! It’s important!”

“Important for you or for us?” she replied snidely.

“Important for you obviously! Who knows what I can accomplish while I’m here. I’m destined for greatness!”

“We don’t need another hopped up purpose junkie who comes in for a day pops off his purpose and leaves us scrambling to refill there shifts”

“Another? This happens often?” This had completely thrown Bert.

“We get one of you a few times a year. Sometimes they get a purpose, sometimes they don’t, but they always leave, and they’re always rude” The dispassionate tone she talked about people achieving their purpose, the greatest achievement in a person’s life, weighed on Bert. On the one hand it filled him with hope that he might find his purpose here but on the other the mundane commonality this lady presented achieving a purpose here made it seem like it would not be unique or important. These two emotions grappled with each other in Bert’s oesophagus as he mustered up a reply.

“Well.. I won’t be like them.” As he said these words he wasn’t sure if he wanted them to be true or not. “My purpose isn’t a one stop shop, It’s to help people over time. So if it’s my purpose I’m here to stay.”

“I’ve not heard of anyone having a purpose like that.” She raised a single sceptical eyebrow.

“Well I do, it’s a thing. okay” Bert said unconvincingly.

“Okay then, I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you some shifts, but you need to stay for at least a week, whether you get your purpose or not.”

“Okay deal.”

Bert was not expecting to defend the moral fortitude of trying to achieve his purpose. It was a given that achieving your purpose was a good thing, it was not something up for debate and yet here this woman was speaking about a purpose as if it was an overhyped birthday party or an underwhelming brunch. He signed himself down to be rostered on for the upcoming week.

It was clear that it wasn’t just the lady at the desk who had held reservations about Bert for seeking his purpose. The attitude of many other volunteers was similar, many of whom rarely gave Bert the time of day. This didn’t faze Bert, he wasn’t here to make friends. On Monday he was assigned to help cook up the massive quantities of spaghetti that were going to be served to the residents that evening. Day two was slightly better, being assigned to mopping up the sleeping quarters. As he got used to the labour he stopped minding it too much. The superiority complex woven throughout his being was not so easily untangled but at the very least he was not outwardly expressing distaste for all the jobs he was allotted. It still wasn’t hard to spot him in the crowds. He stuck out from all the other volunteers because of his contemptuous level of protective clothing. The administrative staff did their best to assign him jobs that didn’t involve interacting with the residents to avoid subjecting them to Bert’s pomposity, but on Thursday they were low on staff and needed another pair of hands to serve food in the evening.

He stood at the bench at the kitchen scooping out soup for a couple of hours surveying the residents. His self-entitled demeanour and blunt replies did not go overlooked by the residents, but most ignored him, apart from one young girl who gave him several determined eye-rolls until she was sure he had seen them. The purpose of these eyerolls was not to initiate a response because when he opened his mouth to respond she walked off. Similarly to Bert she stuck out from the crowd. But where Bert appeared like a fish out of water, she seemed more like a fish that had committed to evolving legs, growing accustomed to life on the land and then being thrown into the ocean anyway. She had a long jet-black fringe deliberately covering her right eye. Bert hadn’t seen this style in anyone outside of high school before, but she had to be at least twenty if she understood the references to classic cartoon characters plastered on all her clothes. She walked on her tip-toes giving her gait a distinct bob up and down and she always kept her hands locked together in front of her with her shoulders hunched up. Her shoes were almost worn through but showed evidence of extravagant origins. This had to be a deliberate choice as the shelter would provide donated shoes to residents whose own were looking beleaguered. His eyes followed her round the room as he continued to pour soup in upcoming residents bowls. Her sunken eyes were an unremarkable shade of brown, probably because all the remarkableness was saved for whatever was going on in her head, as she bopped around the room deciding on a place to sit down. Bert wondered if he should ask her what that was about, clearly oblivious to the conceited persona radiating off. He came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth it and grabbed his coat and headed home. He didn’t give her a second thought for the rest of the night as his mind was too busy thinking about himself. Bert hadn’t felt anything particularly purposeful or special today again, but figured he’d give it one last go tomorrow. The sceptical thoughts he had been forcing away for the better part of the fortnight were returning in strength tonight. He was still managing to keep them at bay but his determination that he was right was waning. He needed to feel something decisive soon.

He came in to the shelter the next day and resumed handing out food to the residents. His mind was blank as he passed out today's beans and rice. His despondent train of thought was interrupted by someone talking to him.

“Why are you here?” A soft but stern voice called out.

Bert’s eyes zoomed in to focus, noticing the girl who had been rolling her eyes at him the previous day.

“What?” He muttered as his mind snapped back into reality.

“Why are you here?” The girl repeated accusingly, eyeing down his condescending protective outfit.

“Why am I Here? I’m here to help people?” Bert replied, voice muffled through the headpiece of his ensemble which resembled a homemade hazmat suit due to the fact he designed it after an evening googling ‘homemade hazmat suit’.

“Well, you’re not very good at it” She chided as she shovelled some beans onto her plate.

“What do you mean I’m not very good at it? You didn’t have food before, I give you food, now you have food, I’ve helped you” Bert defended, quite taken aback

“Yeah but you really don’t make an effort to even pretend like you’re enjoying yourself” She was now moving on to scooping up some rice.

“I don’t need to enjoy myself to help you” Bert was struggling to comprehend why he was being attacked.

“No, I guess not, but it does mean you’re not very good at helping people” She casually retorted, not making any effort to look at him.

“Well would you be enjoying helping people?” Bert took off his headpiece to begin launching an offensive of his own.

“I’d enjoy it more than I enjoy being helped by people.” The girl looked up from her food into Bert’s polka dotted face.

“You could be a little bit more grateful” He was now starting to get annoyed he was being pestered by someone he was helping.

“I’d be a little bit more grateful if you didn’t act like you were better than everyone while you helped.” She made quotation marks in the air.

“How do I act like I’m better than everyone?” Bert replied in shock, clearly unaware of the thick air of conceit that surrounded him.

“Well for starters, look at what you’re wearing,” she gestured to his outfit. “Not to mention you do that thing where every few people you serve you make this beleaguered sigh that screams out ‘I wish I was somewhere else’.”

“Of course, I wish I was somewhere else, everyone else here wishes they were somewhere else.”

“But at least you can go somewhere else.”

“Look, it’s not my fault I’m not homeless! I need the suit because like it or not, you’re all homeless and I don’t know your hygiene standards.” Bert replied, trying to deflect the legitimate point the girl had just made.

“How do you know everyone else here is homeless?” She responded, starting to express the same frustration Bert had already manifested.

“It’s a homeless shelter! You can tell just by looking at them!” Bert gestured to the room full of people.

A crowd was starting to gather around to watch. Some were collecting food from different volunteers and filtering out, while more interested residents were forming a semi-circle.

“You can’t tell if someone is homeless by looking at them, you can tell if they’re homeless by looking at their homes maybe, but not by looking at them.”

“Yes you can, by looking ragged in worn out clothes you look homeless.”

“Okay Mr Wise guy, am I homeless? Can you tell just by looking at me?” She adjusted her fringe so it covered the appropriate amount of her face.

“Well.. yeah you are.” This felt like a trap, but she did clearly look like a vagabond to him.

“Nope, wrong idiot, I’m not homeless,” She replied smugly.

“If you’re not homeless then what are you doing in a homeless shelter?!” Bert was beginning to raise his voice, gaining the attention of more followers.

“I still need food, I can’t get to my kitchen right now.” She said brazenly.

“How can you not get to your kitchen?”

“Well I’m staying in my car at the moment.” .

“Oh okay so you’re homeless,” Bert said sarcastically.

“I have a home okay!” The girl yelled back. This had hit a nerve.

“I’m trying to interpret this in a way where you are not a complete moron but I’m running out of ways to do that,” Bert sarcastically retorted.

“Listen, dick, just because you’re better off doesn’t mean you’re better than. We’re here because we have problems and we’re working through them. You can at least show us some respect!” This was followed by some vague murmurs of agreement by the more invested members of the audience.

“You think you’ve got problems?! I’ve got problems too, okay! My purpose was to pick up a piece of literal trash! .

“That’s your problem!? Your purpose isn’t good enough for you!? I would kill to have that purpose! No one gives a dusty fuck about your legacy. My family won’t even let me into my home because I won’t follow their stupid purposes! At least the only person you’re letting down with your purpose is yourself. Dickhead.”

She threw her plate down on the bench and stormed off. For a moment Bert was fuming, ready to shout back some of his own obscenities but after taking a second to cool off he decided against it. Bert felt a more palpable coldness towards him not just from the other residents but also from the rest of the volunteers for the remainder of the evening. This coldness felt unwarranted at first, but he began thinking about what she had said. The more he thought about it, the more her arguments started to make sense to him. There was a slight, ever so slight chance that he was in the wrong. He felt a wince of shame. The conversation weighed on his mind. He tried analysing it from every possible angle to find one where he wasn’t in the wrong but was out of luck, when his shift ended he figured he should find the girl and apologise.

She wasn’t easy to find as she wasn’t staying in the shelter but was in her car parked nearby. He had walked past it several times while checking the windows of much shabbier cars in the area. It was a surprisingly fancy car for someone eating from a homeless shelter, and so he had not considered it in his original search. He knocked on the door on the driver's side and the window rolled down.

“What do you want?” The girl asked coldly. She was slumped in the driver’s seat with one headphone in her ears and woolly blanket covering her.

“I thought about what you said… and I just wanted to apologise.” Bert forced his eyes up even though his shame wanted him to avert them. It was important she knew this was sincere.

“…Yeah …well …I guess that’s okay” She pulled out her other headphone when it became clear Bert was going to keep talking.

“I’ve always thought purposes are the most important thing so when I had a problem wi-” Bert was interrupted mid-sentence.

“If you’re going to start monologuing you should come in, it's cold out” The girl replied with a bit more warmth in her voice but still remaining a degree of distance.

“Oh okay, yeah… thanks.” Bert walked around to the other side of the car and sat in the passenger seat.

“My name’s Georgie by the way”

“Nice to meet you Georgie, I’m Robert, but you can call me Rob.”

”Can I call you Bert?” She requested.

“Please call me Rob.”

“Sorry I already know a Rob.”

“Oh... Go figure.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Bert sighed.

“So, you were saying?” She prompted Bert to continue.

“Oh yes, well, I’ve always thought that purposes were the most important thing in someone’s life. I’ve been having trouble with mine so I got a bit caught up worrying about myself so I wasn’t really taking into account that other people might be having problems as well. I didn’t even think that people could have problems with their purpose so I thought I was the only one. Which is why I may have come across as arrogant” Georgie had turned around to face him as he said this but still maintained a reserved expression occasionally scoffing at the stupider parts of what he had said.

“Well… now you know, we’ve all got problems. It’s wasn’t that hard”

“Yeah I suppose it wasn’t, but yeah anyway, I’m sorry I got caught up and belittled your problems” He hoped she could feel the sincerity of his response.

“That’s okay, and I’m sorry you got shafted with a bad purpose” Georgie begrudgingly accepted his apology.

“Thanks, I’m still holding out hope there’s a bit more to it but I appreciate it. So what was your purpose? Having a baby?” Bert tested the waters to satisfy his curiosity. Purposes were always of interest to him.

“No, that’s precisely not my purpose, which is the problem. But I’d rather not get into it right now.” Georgie's voice retracted back to the distant tone she had been using earlier.

“Oh yeah of course fair enough… Well, let me make it up to you, I don’t like that you’re stuck in your car in the middle of a winter night. I’ve got a spare room in my house. You can stay there for a while until your family lets you back in or some other arrangement comes up?”

“That might be a lot longer than you think it could be.”

“Well maybe I can help.”

“Are you planning on murdering me?”

“Almost definitely not.”

“I’m not convinced but at the same time, I could really use a shower that hasn’t been used by a hundred people before me. But I’m warning you, If you kill me I’ll ruin your Afterlife.” The threat was not idle, she said the last sentence surprisingly fiercely.

“Well I definitely won’t now,” he joked, “I’ll go grab my car and you can tail me home.”

“Oh… this thing doesn’t have any fuel, it ran out about a month ago” Georgie looked down at her feet again.

“Ah, figures. Well come with me and I’ll drive us home.”

“… thanks.” She replied sheepishly.

It was quite late when they reached Bert’s home. He made himself busy with the lock, attempting to fill the awkward silence between him and his new housemate. They quietly creaked open the door and walked into the living room. Once again his father’s portrait had fallen off the wall. Bert quietly cursed himself for not having replaced the string at the back sooner. The irony was lost on him as he hung it up again while still not replacing the string. This time he hadn’t been so fortunate and a large crack had appeared over where his father’s mouth was. It had the distorting effect of making it look like he was frowning. This enabled Georgie to recognise who it was.

“Is that your dad?” Georgie asked, with forced politeness.

“Yeah, we had his funeral a few weeks ago, but I like to keep the picture around.” Bert responded, relieved to have something to talk about, and pleased that the question was all pleasantries and no substance.

“Good funeral?” Georgie continued, determined to be polite.

“Yeah, he had a great purpose so there was a lot to celebrate.” Bert hadn’t reflected on his father’s purpose since that night. Doing so brought up conflicting feelings . What he would’ve given to have his purpose now.

“Let me show you to your room.”

Bert led Georgie to the spare bedroom upstairs, directed her to all the utilities available to her before retiring to his own room. His past two weeks weighed on his mind. Helping people wasn’t helping. He still had one more day rostered on. He wasn’t sure who he would be if he accepted that his purpose was second-rate, but he wasn’t about to go down that rabbit hole while any hope remained.

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