Word Count: 261
She looked through the closets and under the bed. She went through every dresser drawer and took everything off shelves to check along the walls and into dark corners. Desperate, she went through all the kitchen cabinets, the vanity and the linen closet in the bathroom. She pulled out each set of towels and shook them, refolded them back into neat piles. She looked under the bed again. She couldn’t find it anywhere.
“Did you look out in the hall?” asked her neighbor. “Maybe you left it in class,” suggested her best friend Irene. “No,” she said, and “no, I wouldn’t have,” she answered. She was getting quite grumpy with all the suggestions of where she should look. If anyone knew where it was, it was herself, after all. Though she appreciated the concern, it was all speculation and nothing helpful at all.
As the flowers outside bloomed and wilted, as the maple trees spread their tips into green fingers, changed polish to fiery red for the autumn, dropped in a swoon before winter, she search and searched without luck.
Irene told her, “You need to get out more, see the whole world outside of your narrow street, your three-room apartment, your laptop and virtual friends.”
“But I like my street, my home, my Facebook and twitter friends,” she said.
“Is that what makes you happy?” asked Irene.
She thought about it carefully before she shook her had and looked down with a barely audible “no.”
“Then find it elsewhere,” Irene said with a smile. “You might try looking outside.”
