Unseen

Written for Sadje’s What Do You See
and for Fandango’s Story Starter.
Here’s where the prompts took me.

Steven had a bad day and just needed something to make him feel better.

This was not, to be fair, an unusual situation. Steven had bad days the way other people had lunch …. regularly, predictably …. and with very little prompting. The particular shade of bad that colored his days didn’t come from a dramatic event but from something quieter and somehow worse: the steady soaking sensation of being completely, utterly, cosmically ignored.

At work, people talked through him. At the coffee shop, baristas spelled his name wrong on the cup. His neighbor’s dog, who barked ferociously at squirrels, mail carriers, and floating leaves, regarded Steven with a yawn of massive indifference.

So one morning, in a gesture of frustration, Steven placed a brown paper bag over his head.

“If no one sees me anyway,” he reasoned, adjusting it around his ears, “I might as well be comfortable about it.”

He kept the straw hole for his iced latte; he wasn’t unreasonable.

The odd thing was that the world looked much the same through the bag’s tiny imperfections and soft brown glow. People still rushed past. Coffee was still iced. The sun was still indecisive about whether to shine or hide.

But Steven found, to his surprise, that he looked differently.

When you cannot be easily seen, you begin, strangely, to see.

He had been walking for some time with no destination in mind, when he turned down a narrow lane he had never noticed before…. which was remarkable, because Steven had walked this neighborhood for a dozen years.

The lane was cobblestone, winding between two rows of brick buildings. And there, at the wall of the last building at the lane’s end, Steven stopped.

On the wall were wooden shoes.

Not just any wooden shoes …. clogs, the old Dutch kind, painted in blazing orange-red and sunshine yellow, mounted right there on the brick wall as casually as picture frames in a living room.

And the three yellow ones, lower down, cradled bouquets of flowers …. pink lilies spilling from one, purple geraniums tumbling from another. A little spray of joyfully chaotic wild flowers in the third, like a happy surprise.

On the ground below sat a wide basin brimming with pink tulips and yellow daffodils, stems comfortably leaning against each other like old friends.

Steven stood very still.

He had walked past hundreds of flower shops. He had seen gardens and parks and elaborately landscaped homes. None of it had ever made him feel anything in particular.

But this? This was different.

Someone …. some actual human person who had to buy groceries and pay bills and deal with the neighbor’s dog …. had taken a perfectly ordinary brick wall and decided, for no practical reason whatsoever, to hang wooden shoes on it and fill them with flowers. Not in a museum. Not in a catalog. Just here, on a Tuesday, on a cobblestone lane, for anyone or no one.

Steven reached up and touched the rim of his paper bag. He didn’t take it off, not yet. He wasn’t quite ready for that.

But he pulled the straw from his latte and poked a slightly larger hole, just enough to press his nose through and smell the tulips properly. They smelled, he thought, like the color pink …. like something that gently persists and exists despite the general indifference of the universe.

He sat down on the cobblestones and looked at the wall for a long time. A brass key hung between the two orange clogs and he wondered what it opened. He decided, for the first time in a long time, that he wanted to find out.

Maybe tomorrow the bag will come off. Steven decided to give it some thought.

NAR©2026
#WDYS
#FSS

This is “Wildflowers” by Tom Petty

What do you see # 341- 17 May, 2026

Fandango’s Story Starter #247

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}