The lost one did not notice the music until it was very close. When he had woken enough from his tragedy to hear it, he raised his head and wiped the tears with his fist and craned his neck to peer around the corner.

A short man approached the deserted marketplace. He wore black corduroy trousers and suit jacket, narrow black leather shoes tapping on the cobblestone. Cradled in his hands was an old lyre, and from it he produced a beautiful song, and from his lips he sung in a language the boy had never heard before. The child could count the languages he knew with his ten fingers but this strange song was not one of them, and so he listened to the notes plucked by hands that curved and arched with an artist’s grace, absorbed the words produced in deep lows and high trills from his lips, his mouth, down through his throat and deep in his chest and his heart. This man did not make music, but he became it.

The boy, hesitant, stood up and took a step from the shadow that was his blanket.

The music stopped. The man’s fingers froze in place as obedient creatures but yet with a will that yearned to continue on the strings. His beautifully foreign language dissipated as smoke, and the man closed his lips softly and looked upon the child. He was like this a period of time, standing wistfully in an empty space as the child stood close to that gold cement architecture. And then, in a familiar language, he spoke, and the boy translated to his native tongue.

What calls your soul to the coming night sky, child? he seemed to say.

The lost one said nothing. Instead, he pointed.

Ah, I see. The songs speak to you, do they? How remarkable, child of this country may grow such taste.

The man didn’t move towards the boy, but he sat down cross-legged in the middle of the empty street, his face largely shadowed with the sun’s light nearly gone at the horizon behind him.

Would you know why I sing in the night? It likely matters not a thing to you, but I will tell, regardless.

Do you see your countrymen? By the light of day they toil in their new factories and throw their waste in the streets. These people spend their six days sweating for another’s gain and they dedicate another to give their keep to their gods and they kiss the feet of the rich because they were born to do so, and they obey. These people conceive and bear their children so they, too, may one day find themselves bound by chain.

The mass grows. This city crowds with filth. So much take and no give; it is unnatural. These humans, they lose life in spirit, they find only receipt for its sale, they trade it for coin, they cast it away—morality chafes the mind and the tongue and the hands—and they dump it away by the bucketful.

I find nature grow restless. I see the trees felled for their fuel and green blackened to ash for the new roads of foul tar. Sometimes, I feel the air tremble around me, like breath of man whose heart anguishes for loss. Sometimes the clouds blacken themselves and the trembling turns to sobs and I feel her cry on crown of my head and on shoulders and my breast. But nature just hardens her heart and sends the clouds away, not willing to show her children grief, because they are all her children, from long ago, just grown with ages until they’ve forgotten.

The man sighed deeply, rolling his shoulders and bowing his head.

I talk to her when her lost children wander to their beds. I talk into the stars and the wind whispers into my ears. What she say? I sometimes ask. I have forgotten how to listen. I am deaf to her voice. All because of these cursed people! He screamed with a sudden ferocity down the street, at the street, at the houses, at the abandoned wooden cart sagging a little by a decrepit shack some distance away. He paused for breath. But I try to seek peace, still. I think if I sing she doesn’t have to speak, only listen. I take as others do, but not as much, and I try to give back. I really do try, and time to time I do listen in hopes I can hear again, but she is still lost…. Lost and yet… found. He looked at the boy. We are all a people with shortcomings, child. All of us.

The man sat in silence for quite some time as the Lost One watched him. But the child fidgeted, and then walked slowly to the man, for he was scared and confused alone in a darkening place, without warmth, and without comfort.

The man studied the boy with eyes still cloaked in shadow. He said nothing, until: You are lost?

The Lost One nodded.

Aren’t we all… the boy heard him whisper to himself. But then the man spoke to him. Come. Walk with me, and we can sing for her.

The man stood and gripped his lyre in his left hand, reaching out with his right to take the boy’s but he did not give his hand, for it was clenched into a fist. The man spoke. Are you well, little one?

The boy opened up his fingers like a flower unfolding its petals, and in his palm was a braided silver ring with a pinkish gem, and in the fading light it caught a shimmering glow that reflected into the sky and into the man’s eyes. For an instant, they were visible: his eyes were a dark gray.

The man spoke again. What is this? You carry a ring? Well… Let us go. No? You shake your head at this. Perhaps… Perhaps I help you find your way home? Yes… Yes, I will help.

The boy gave his free hand to the man and clutched the ring again. It reminded him of his new friend. Might he see him again someday? The Lost One wanted to see this friend. He was there when no one else was.

Do not worry, child. I will help you. I will give today. I take and I give… I give and I take.

As the sun dipped away the man glanced around the empty marketplace, and he looked up and down the street but there was not a man that walked the way, nor any automobile that belched smoke and growled and rolled stiffly through. And, once he had seen, he walked, but his lyre was still, and his song was absent, and the child followed him, thinking of his mother and his father, thinking of home, but never that day had he felt so alone.