Directionless

A Weekend Short Story

The woman disengaged herself from the continuously scrolling digital advertisement and wiped her brow. Twenty minutes ago, she was happily browsing at the bookstore, lost in her own world. Five minutes ago, when she stepped out of the store, she was enamoured by the brightly lit windows with dresses, accessories, and sumptuous goodies on display.

She walked where her eyes led her, keeping close to the windows to check out the prices, until she came to a dead end with a giant screen playing an ad on mute. The actors mouthed a jingle and danced with the product, a newly launched juice brand. A ticker rolled above the prancing figures, incessantly informing the shoppers that the juice was available only at the supermarket in the basement.

The word ‘basement’ lured her out of her reverie. The dead end was not a good omen because the only way out she knew was through the basement, which led to the underground metro, and for that, she needed an escalator going down.

She retraced her steps back to the bookstore, paying scant attention to the windows that mesmerised her a few minutes ago. If she hadn’t been in a hurry, she would have noticed that the shops were not the same and nor were the window displays. She looked for the familiar banner outside the bookstore that proclaimed a store-wide discount, but it had disappeared. How could they shut the shop so early? It was only 9pm.

It took her a while to realise that she had done it again, a personal record of getting lost due to her acute lack of direction; it was the seventeenth time.

Chuckling at her incompetency, she asked a friendly staff for directions to the underground station. Instructions were crisp and clear. Walk further down, look up for signs, and follow them. The woman suppressed the urge to wisecrack and nodded her head vigorously. She couldn’t blame the man because following the signs is what any sensible person would do, but she had half a mind to remind him of the movie ‘Don’t Look Up!’

Thanking him for his kind help, the woman scurried along the corridor, looking for the signs hanging overhead. The glasses perched helpfully on her nose made reading easy, but she was helpless when it came to deciphering letters from a distance. So, she increased her pace to save time spent approaching the signboard to gawk at it from close quarters and retracing her steps if needed. After several false attempts, she found the exit and gambolled toward it like a happy puppy to a treat.

Alas, instead of the sterile, adequately lit interiors of an underground metro station, she found herself blinking in the great outdoors, which was already yawning and nodding at a cloudy, moonless night. But wait, she wasn’t in the great outback, was she? She was at the junction of three major avenues of the business district.