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Essay On The Story Of A Short Story

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“I’ll tell you how I survived,” the old man said. We sat in an empty coffee shop at a table set up next to a floor to ceiling window. The window looked out onto a busy main street with crowds of people walking back and forth. I kicked my feet, too short to touch the ground, against the legs of the chair. The old man turned a half-empty red mug around in circles on the table. “It’s quite funny, actually.”

The people outside, in their hooded winter coats and scarves, were braced against the cold, fighting the wind for their warmth. I squinted as I stared at them. There was something strange about them. Something about them pulled at me, like the shrill beep of an alarm clock in another room but I couldn’t-

“Stop kicking your chair,” the old man said, “Please. How old are you anyway, girl?”

My eyes looked over at his dim reflection in the window. “Ten,” I said.

His hair was bright white, cut short, and flowed down into a thin, neatly barbered, mustache and beard. His skin was the wrinkled brown of a long life spent under the sun. “Stop kicking your chair, he said. “And why do you keep looking out the window? Do you want to hear this story or not?”

I stopped swinging my feet, not because I felt a need to obey the old man, but because of a thought that crept into my head as quiet and ugly, as a cockroach’s shadow; I had no idea who this man was.
I kept looking out the window, my eyes rising up from the people on the street to a city skyline that I couldn’t recognize. I

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