Ryan St. Germain
The white lights twinkled all over the front of the department store. In the middle of the afternoon you might not have noticed them from as close as I was standing but the sky, which had been blue and was giving way to gray as it did every afternoon, gave the little lights a better chance of being seen.
I’d arrived early and stood outside waiting. I’m almost always early to a first meting and this afternoon I’m come to meet Miu for the first time. I’d left the house later than I expected, still arriving in the square earlier than I thought I would. I looked around as I waited for her to arrive, having a vague notion but no certainty of which direction she was coming in.
A man sat with a xylophone in his lap, playing something that sounded vaguely like christmas music, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It was light, but not quite cheerful and felt just a little off, sort of like the sky did. Birds passed low overhead as people parked and collected bicycles from the sea of them that surrounded me. Footsteps fell on the cobblestones in varying heaviness as people of all sorts passed me by.
I saw Miu approaching from a distance and knew it was her with immediate certainty. The first thing that I noticed were the earmuffs she was wearing, followed by the face that I’d seen in photographs. She saw me and waved, greeting me with a smile. When we were face-to-face we shook hands and went inside.