He sat waiting; in that brief moment, forming a web, unseen, unnoticed, and invisible.
It began with him. He was looking at a schoolboy standing nearby on the street corner. In turn, the boy was gazing at a policeman standing on the diagonally opposite corner. The policeman was focused on a teenager, who stood smoking a cigarette across the street. The teenager was eyeing a girl standing further along the footpath, who seemed to be waiting for a lift. The girl was watching an elderly man who was standing at the bus stop. The elderly man was looking at the driver sitting in his car.
The man noticed that the boy’s uniform was the same as his son’s. He wondered whether the two boys knew each other. The boy was looking at the policeman’s uniform. He knew a policeman who lived in his street and had often wondered if that was what he wanted to be. The policeman wondered whether it was possible that the teenager he was looking at was the same person he had recently seen on a poster, registered as a missing person. The teenager was eyeing the girl. He thought she was pretty and wondered whether or not he recognised her as one of his sister’s friends. The girl was concentrating on the elderly man at the bus stop, who reminded her of her own late grandfather. The old man was squinting at the man waiting in his car at the traffic light. He was some distance away and his eyesight wasn’t that good, but he was sure he recognised his son’s friend who manages a local gymnasium.
The man in the car saw the light had changed to green, and moved off.
The web was broken, with none of them knowing that it was ever there…