Lady on the Bench

A Story by joheic

As she sat on the bench, silently tossing the striped seeds a few feet in front of her, the birds began to feel more comfortable in her presence. The young man would walk by the publicly owned park bench every day to work, he would always see this woman, old and frail her hands shaking from the cold, feeding the same birds time after time. He never understood why she fed them, what joy she got from it, what profit she made, he would just see her there, keeping the perky birds company and well fed. They have never uttered a word to each other. The man was young, lively, he would wear a slim-fitted suit to work every day, walked with importance, kept his head held high, and his mouth shut on his morning walks. The woman was old, with her clothes tattered in some places and patched with loosely sewn pieces of cloth that never quite stayed level with the rest of the cloth on her clothes. They never even made eye contact. The woman and the man lived in perfect contradiction until one day she never showed up on the bench. The man, even though he never met this woman, noticed her absence but nothing more. The next day on his morning walk he noticed once again the woman was missing from the bench. This pattern repeated for about five days until the man began to wonder what happened to her. He began asking people at his work place, but none of them knew of the poor woman. The quest to find this bird lady began for the man, he checked newspapers for any obituaries that sounded familiar, but alas there were none. He checked around the park for any evidence of where she could’ve left. The woman was nowhere to be found. Another week passed and the man had given up the woman. She never showed up in his life again. Every single afternoon on his walk back from work, the young man walks to the bench, faces away from it, unbuttons his jacket, loosens his tie, pops open his top button and slowly brings his body lower to the ground until it softly touches the wood, then he relaxes. He reaches in his jacket pocket, grabs a small bag of sunflower seeds, and every day as he sits on the bench, silently tossing the striped seeds a few feet in front of him, the birds begin to feel more comfortable in his presence.