Enjoy this short story I wrote as an exercise for my playwriting class!
The man was old. That was the first thing I noticed. His wrinkled fingers stretched along the fishing pole cast out into the midnight sea. The moon reflected atop his graying hair. He scratched his beard as he turned his head, facing me.
“Alone on the boardwalk at this hour?” he asked.
I studied him, but I did not feel unsafe. I nodded slowly.
He spoke again: “What is that around your neck?”
I looked down at the charm. A partridge, plaited in gold. I could see it clearer in the moonlight than I had beneath the surface. Its ridges stared back at me, compelling me with every etch and carving. The chain was old but the partridge looked new. Or, at the very least, it had been cleaned often. Kept safe.
“I found it,” was my reply to the old man.
He suddenly grinned, showing off the gaps where teeth should have been.
“So you did.” The old man reeled in his fishing line, nothing attached. He stared out at the sea, waves crashing into the boardwalk.
I wanted to leave him there, but something inside me made me stay.
“Are you okay?” I asked.“So I am,” was his reply. “I have been looking.”
“Looking for what?”
The answer became clear as he looked back at the gold partridge. I stared down at it again, trying to memorize every curve of its wings and the sharpness of its open beak. I did not know what to say.
My legs curled under me as I positioned myself next to the old man. He smiled, a smile seemingly only for himself and the ocean. And maybe the waning moon hanging lonely in the sky.
“People look for that,” he finally said. “People all over. People like me.”
“Why?” I asked him. “What is so special about it?”
To that, he gave me no answer. I followed his gaze up to the twinkling specs in the sky, silently repeating my question to every single one, but I did not receive an answer.
“May I?” said the old man, gesturing to the necklace.
I slipped it off over my head. As I held the charm in my palm, it seemed to glisten. The gold shimmered across the crying bird, begging to be seen. As the man took the charm from my hand, it seemed to dull.
Suddenly, the bird wasn’t gold, it wasn’t shimmering. The beak wasn’t open in its famous cry. It rusted in his hand, the bird moving until it was asleep. The beautiful sparkle that had once been became just another antique; dirty, pitiful, old.
When the man had finished studying it, he returned the partridge to my hand. The charm seemed to sparkle, and once again, it returned to its former golden beauty.
“It’s you,” the man told me.
I replaced the chain over my head and looked back at the moon for a moment. When I turned my head back to the old man, he was gone.
Yet something still seemed to whisper in the cold night wind: “It’s you.”