The Found

 I will try and tell it how it was without too much emotion, the cold clarity of the perfect observer, but how can I? How can anyone? Everyone loses something.

I could feel the day arriving, a tightening of the neck muscles, a feeling that something untoward was rushing headlong towards us. My room was roasting with the warmth of the fire and my old bones did not fancy a walk in the spitting rain; but someone had to tell him, so I put on my waterproofs and set off.

The Founder sat at the top of the steep hill watching all the lost things become found.

There were new oceans created that day as the weeping of the mothers; the cries of lovers, as their men, their women came back to them alive, dead, wealthy, crazy. There were tears of joy, of sorrow, of disbelief, and a whole host of people crying who didn't even know why.

I walked through the madness ignoring a dead lover I had been glad to get rid of and a mountain of bills I had long forgotten about. Around me, psychotics stopped their babbling and became DJs, helpless jakies put down their special brew, brushed themselves down and wandered off in search of the child they never knew they had.

One by one the government resigned - without any more secrets they were instantly unmasked. Waves of realisation spread like a disease through the law enforcement agency. The country had always been in the hands of uniform wearing paedophiles, junkies, gangsters and racists. There were arrests, counter-arrests, and gunfights but mostly the police were engaged in mass bouts of suicide.

Masonic officers who were unshaken, already being well aware of the dark façade, were quick to take control but soon found power without lies terribly difficult and quickly vanished with most of the countries' collateral.

As I reached the crest of the hill I saw the Founder perched on his bench looking down upon the carnage that had spread through the city like a pay-day Sharon on a shopping spree.

“This has to stop,” I said, taking a seat.

“One day it all will” he says, miming an atomic explosion and sniggering.

Somewhere deep to the south-west floods from displaced seawater destroyed town after town as the spires of Atlantis sought to reconfigure the atlas.

“This has to stop” I repeat. The Founder looks at me a flicker of a smile playing across his lips.

A man throws money in the air, his buried treasure finally in hand, a woman cries out her shrills accompanied by the beeping of her mobile, as all the mistresses her husband had ever texted bounced back in a barrage of truth.

We sit in silence for a minute. I try a different tack: “Why?” I ask.

“My dear man do you know how many misplaced things there are? Do I get any credit for being the universal cleaner? No its lady luck this, my lucky charm that, and the Founder, the solver to all your crises, the discoverer, where am I?” He turned to face me “Damn it man, I'm as far away as you get from a loser, but is there any reference to me anywhere, any religion, idol or festival? No, nothing. Well I've had enough. Now they will know who I am, just try ignoring me now.” He waved his hands over the city, a chaos conductor orchestrating a symphony of the unforgotten.

 A corpse's rotten head rolled past the park bench as some dead lovers reached their climax. A tyrannosaurus rex trundled down the hill in search of nourishment.

“What about the Lost it?” I asked.

“Oh him, he was quite happy for his day off, you can't imagine how tiring it gets losing things all the time.” Replied the Founder.

“What about having nothing left to do?” He was silent. I stared straight into his clear blue eyes. “What is this, some form of suicide?”

“Do you not think I have thought many times of the final found object, and the peace and harmony that would come with it?” The Founder sighed.

I kept pushing in the direction of his ego “Isn't that just oxymoron, an impossibility in the order of things? Surely you need us and we need you?”

“Where would you be without me?” He said looking for the first time slightly confused; “Perhaps you are right… maybe it is time to put the toys back in the pram.” Then he stopped and it seemed as if the whole world stopped as well, if only for a moment. After a while he got up to go as cries of the newly departed blared around us.

“So will this day be remembered?” I asked.

 “Something's are better off lost.” He replied on his way off.

“And this conversation?” I shouted after him.

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