The Return

He sat alone at the small, round, mahogany table in the corner of the bar. This particular table was usually reserved for any pair of gentlemen who wished the ogle the serving maidens in relative secrecy, but there was no ogling coming from it this night and as much as the town didn't seem to appreciate what this man and his companions had done for them, the bartender at least appreciated this man's pain enough to not ask him to move.

The man had come into town a few hours ago with four other companions, the only people in the world he had been close to over the past 15 years, but at this point, even they had left him. They had all come expecting a glorious and joyous return and instead they had been greeted by emptiness and the occasional guilt. They thought they had wanted greater companionship, but after the way things had gone, they all decided they wanted less. And so each man, friend, adventurer, whatever they had become over the past 15 years, went his own separate way to find his own forgotten place in which to seek what little solace he could find.

This man chose this bar, far less unchanged than the people he had once gathered with here to drink in celebration or anguish or just because they could. Only now, he was alone and forgotten at this corner table that was the same as it had been 15 years ago but which he had never even sat out until now. He had never wanted to be hidden until now.

He was playing with a thin layer of dust on the table when he heard footsteps coming his way. He looked up to see a girl walking his way, he would have guessed her to be no more than 14 years old, but since she appeared to be six or seven months pregnant, and was no being looked upon by anyone else in the bar with shame, it was likely she was at least a couple years older than that. The next thing he noticed after these observations of the girl herself was the flagon she was carrying outstretched towards him.

"I didn't order anything yet," he said as she sat the mug down right in front of him.

"It's okay," she said. "This one's on me. You look like you need it." She just stood there, gazing at him intently, if he were more focused he might even have said lovingly, until he finally felt obligated to take a swig.

"Very good," he lied, for the taste hadn't even registered enough in his brain for him to determine if it was good or not.

She nodded and sat down in the chair across from him continuing to stare. She looked like she wanted to say something, but didn't quite know how to begin. Something within him jumped, and he felt a strange compulsion to want to help her, and as he sat looking back at her, trying to ascertain how he might do so, he felt an even stranger pulse of recognition looking into her deep blue eyes.

"I know you," he said simply.

The girl smiled, such a beautiful yet sad smile she had. "Yes," she said, placing her hands nervously on the surface of the table, "you do."

"You, you were one of them out near the street when we were walking by," he said, more excitedly than he should have. "You were sweeping your porch and you stopped to look at us when we walked by."

The smile dropped right off her face and she nodded, leaving her head in the downward position to stare and the nearly empty surface of the table. He didn't seem to noticed the change in her demeanor.

He frowned. "Why did you look at me like you did?" he asked.

She looked back up at him, trying to not look as heart-broken as she was feeling. "Excuse me?" she said.

"The way you looked at me," he said. "I didn't think of it at the time, but now, I think, it was somehow... different than how the others looked at me, almost as if you actually felt something about my being there."

She nodded. "I felt," she said, "that all the others ought not to have forgotten you."

He wrinkled his brow in confusion at this. "And you?" he questioned. "You didn't forget us? Were you even born when we left?"

She glanced down at her hands, which were fidgeting with one another, apart from her control, on the top of the table. "It doesn't matter if I was or not," she said. "No one should forget anyone who was once such a close part of their lives or the lives of others close to them."

He sighed heavily. It was clear this girl was just feeling guilty, perhaps about something entirely different. He doubted she even knew where he had been and what he had been doing over the past 15 years, and for some reason, whether she wanted to hear it or not, he felt compelled to tell her. "We were saving the world, you know," he said.

She nodded, still staring at her hands and willing them to stop behaving so badly. "Yes," she said rather morosely, "so I heard."

"It wasn't an easy task, you know," he continued, feeling compelled to take another swig of his drink, "and all we really wanted in return was for someone to remember and appreciate us."

She looked up suddenly, her hands stopped moving, and she seemed again as if she wanted to say something important, but instead all she said was, "Go on. Perhaps if you tell me the story, I can be the one to appreciate you."

Her words shocked him so much that he could think of nothing else to do but to do as she requested. And so, over the next several hours and nearly a dozen additional pints of ale, he told his 15 year story as succinctly as he possibly could. It was only when he got to the very end, and was very, very drunk, that he thought to go back to the very beginning and touch on the wife and child that he had so painfully left behind.

"She didn't even recognize me," he wailed. "And she didn't miss me, even if she had recognized me. She was with another man, had married him not five years after I left."

The girl grew somewhat annoyed at this, but he was to drunk to notice. "And what of your daughter?" she asked. "What was her reaction when she saw you again?"

The man shook his head solemnly. "I have yet to find out," he said. "My wife did not tell me what became of her, and I was too heart-broken to ask."

There was silence for a moment. The girl drummed her fingers a bit on the dusty table. She looked around at the mugs strew about them, then took a deep breath and leaned forward as much as her pregnant belly would allow her to. "I think," she said in a near whisper, just loud enough that he could make out her words, "that she never would have stopped loving you and thinking that you would return. And that when you did return, she would buy you a flagon of ale and sit there listening to you all night while she hoped she could gain up the courage to tell you as much."

There was silence again as the drunken old man sat there blinking at her, trying, in his inhibited state, to understand what she had just said to him. A few eternal moments passed and then she leaned away from him again and stood up. "Thank you, father," she said, stepping forward and squeezing his arm affectionately. "I know you did what you had to, and I appreciate it, even if no one else does. I always knew you would return, and I never stopped loving you."

There was no more pausing to look at him when she finished this statement; she simply released his arm and walked away. He sat there shaking from the alcohol or her words or the touch or all of these until she had faded away into the smokiness of the bar. It was not until this moment that he thought to jump up and shout, "Wait, come back!"

All this elicited was hateful stares from the other bar-goers who had forgotten he was even there and had wished to keep it that way. That beautiful young woman, his daughter, was no where to be seen. She had seemed too young to be his daughter, but he saw it now, it was as clear as every thing else in the world was not. Those eyes and that hair: she had been just a baby when he left her, but those things were just as he remembered them, if only he had remembered them sooner.

With sobs slowly starting to shake his body, he slumped back down into his chair and allowed the other townspeople to return to whatever it was they had been doing. He didn't care. For the first time since he had returned to this place, he was able to cry, and it wasn't because others had failed to remember him, it was because he had failed to remember her. All the pain he had felt, he was sure she was now feeling, and in his current state, he could think of no way to make it up to her. He simply let his head drop hard on top of the table and let his body shake in misery as the tears turned the thin layer of dust to a thin layer of mud. Everything else was forgotten at that moment. All he wished, more than anything in the world, was that she would return.