Misplaced

By Jameson Grem

On the streets, no one looks at him. He is invisible, fallen through the cracks of a society where there is no place and no worth to someone who does not have any material value. That isn’t to say he isn’t noticed, though. On the contrary, he’s a spectre lingering on the edge of their vision like a boogeyman. He makes people uncomfortable. He is a reminder, perhaps a warning, of an alternate existence that they were all taught is worse than death. They feel shame on his behalf, needlessly. He can feel their misplaced feelings of guilt -- can see it in their eyes as they spare him the scantest glance before quickly looking away again, as if afraid that prolonged eye contact will spread the disease to them. They don’t want him to ask for anything because they don’t want to feel the burden of having refused. So he doesn’t ask. 

He finds refuge in a local cafe. The baristas know him by name, and they keep his coffee flowing. It’s a small gesture of kindness, as if they wished they could save his life and pull him back from the edges of existence with caffeine and day-old pastries. But he appreciates it nonetheless. This is where he scours his stack of newspapers every afternoon. What the people of the cafe see is a homeless man sipping greedily on coffee while flipping through the paper and occasionally consulting his plastic water bottles filled with torn, crumpled pages from other publications. No one really questions it. They assume he’s not quite all there. 

What they don’t know is that he isn’t exactly homeless, but rather misplaced. He is from another time and place. The customs here are strange. The language is unfamiliar. For these reasons, integration has felt more or less impossible. It was not the cracks of this society through which he’d slipped, but another entirely. He is just another refugee from a great war so far away from this planet, no Earthling could possibly know of how it raged across galaxies. He has not yet found any other refugees from that war, though he suspects there are others on this planet as well, mingling with the local homeless population. 

His stack of newspapers keep him in touch with things. He looks for messages from other refugees. He looks for messages from other worlds. He looks for the news that Earthlings don’t see in the way the words are arranged, or how the fonts are changed, or the way the images are placed. He looks for news of the end of the war. No such luck yet, but he does find many messages hidden in the pages. When he finds them, they are not coherent, and so he rips those pages out and stuffs them into his plastic water bottles. When the paper is crumpled just so, and the plastic of the bottle squeezed just right, he can decipher the messages. He does not write them down, but he recalls them easily enough, storing them in his mind and in his collection of bottles. 

Today, as he squints into the side of one such vessel, he sees the message “War rages on. I miss you. Please hold on.” He smiles to himself and nods gently and then leans back in his seat and watches the Earthlings around him. The baristas craft drinks in no particular hurry, smiles on their faces as they chat with the regulars seated at the coffee bar. He watches the couples on their first dates. He watches the two cops who have come in for coffee and a donut each. He makes brief eye contact with the young writer across the room, and she quickly looks away. 

He smiles to himself and thinks he can hold on a bit longer. Under his breath he murmurs, “I miss you, too.” It’s good to be missed. He snacks on a gifted pastry as the sun sets outside and thinks fondly of home.