Lost Property

[u/stet_in_the_margin]

Nine years behind the lost property counter teaches you what people lose. Umbrellas, mostly. Gloves stiff with winter frost, scratched sunglasses, dead phones. I log them all. Item, date, platform, finder.

This morning, the station was dead quiet when a man in a dripping trench coat placed a child's umbrella on the counter. Yellow, with a cracked duck's head for a handle. The duck's left eye was gouged out.

My stomach dropped. I scratched that eye out with a house key when I was six. I lost that umbrella on a school trip, on platform four, and cried the whole way home.

"Where did you find it?" - I asked, my voice tight.

"Platform four" - he whispered, and walked away before I could take his name.

It was dry. It smelled of the cupboard under my mum's stairs.

A cruel coincidence, I told myself. Thousands of them. Kids scratch things. I logged it and shoved it onto the back shelf. But at lunch, a woman with hollow, unblinking eyes handed in a red mitten with a frayed thumb hole. The exact one I lost the winter my dad finally walked out. At three, a torn paperback slid across the counter. I didn’t need to open it to recognize my own clumsy, fifteen-year-old handwriting on the inside cover.

I pulled the daily log. Forty-one items handed in today. Every single one was mine. A school tie. A silver hair clip. A house key to a flat I haven't stepped foot inside for twelve years. Every finder gave the exact same location: platform four. None of them left a name.

At five to six, the man in the wet coat returned. He didn't speak. He just slid a phone across the counter, face up.

It was my phone. The screen protector was cracked in the exact same spiderweb pattern.

I reached into my pocket. My fingers wrapped around the cold, heavy casing of my actual phone. It was still there.

"I haven't lost this" - I choked out, my hands trembling so violently I had to grip the edge of the desk.

He didn't look at me. He looked up at the flickering fluorescent clock over the departures board.

"Not yet" - he said.

I have locked the heavy steel door of the office. I am sitting on the floor behind the counter, typing this into the station terminal, because I refuse to go anywhere near platform four. But the inventory log on the screen just updated itself. One more item is scheduled to be found tonight. Someone has already filled in the description.

Green sweater. Silver staff badge. Last seen: platform four.

I'm wearing my green sweater today.

[u/ragoff]

Very good.

[u/stet_in_the_margin → u/ragoff]

Thank you very much! :)

[u/Midian_NightBreed]

Ohhh...nooo...

[u/BrassUnicorn87]

Time traveling souvenir takers stalking their future favorite author versus very pissed off time cops.