I like to watch people. I also like to listen to public conversations (we call this conversation paratrooping). Both together often give me little bits of strangers lives—I sometimes wonder how the people I’m watching got where they did, and wonder how they are going to end up. I think it’s related to my love of short stories—I get a peek into someone’s life, never to see or hear about them again. I find it absolutely fascinating.

Sometimes, however, I come across a slice of life, and wish I could know how things turned out. This evening was like that.

We were walking through Sears when I saw her. Her hair a little too dark, and a little too long, an odd contrast to her long denim skirt and button-up shirt. I half expected to see a kerchief. Second I noticed her face. It wasn’t precisely a look of panic, but she definitely looked frantic, desperately scanning the aisles, looking for someone. She was walking very quickly, that walk/run that you do when you’re in a hurry in public, and then she did that soft yell at a pre-teen boy wandering in the men’s department. She called to him to find his sister, and when he went over to her, they spoke quickly and quietly together. She called out to him as he dashed off, to find his sister, and not to say anything at all to his grandmother.

My first thought was that they’d lost his baby sister—the mother looked like she might have a pre-teen son as well as a toddler, but then the boy found his sister, who couldn’t have been much more than a year or two younger than he was. She was in the direction we were walking, and I continued to watch was we walked towards the exit. I overheard bits of what he was saying to his sister, “…terrible accident…they life-flighted her…whatever you do, don’t tell Grandma.” And then they were off, dashing towards the exit after their mother.

And I’ll probably never know what happened, or how things turn out. They were just random strangers, whose lives may have been turned inside out in one quick moment at the mall.

All I can do is finish their story for myself, giving it a happy ending, and hoping that their story turns out to be the same story I wrote in my head.

ADDENDUM the First: This may be part of that story.