The Path of Least Resistance

She dips into the alcove of the jewellers behind the placard, asking for gold. She stands opposite her target and observes. Every day for the past two weeks, same time, she appears.

First impressions of the shop across the road weren't great: the cluttered window display; the glass, plastered with stickers on the inside; the horrible handwritten request for rare albums; "Vinyl Spin" sits above it all in chipped, faded letters. The "n" has slipped away from the "spin". It is crooked, like the smile she remembers when, as a child, she'd run to Him in fields of wheat and sunshine, arms open.

Today it is raining.

He is absent and present in her head. Perhaps He doesn't exist at all. She fears if she walks across the road, she'll be soaked before she arrives. And she'll approach a stranger, elderly and bearded, and her memory will pop like soapsuds disturbed from dishwater.

She concentrates on the conduits of rain, trickling down the glass, each line mapping the path of least resistance; sometimes two droplets join and gain momentum. When the gold-seller tires of her loitering outside of his premises, she'll move off without objection.

She'll break her cover but won't find the courage to cross the road and burst back into His life, arms open. She'll pull up her hood and hunker down. She'll try to keep her mascara from running although rain and tears work against her. She'll turn her back on Him and keep walking the other way. Easy.

Besides, the man who inhabits her memories is nothing but an embellishment. Perhaps He was never there at all.