The Lost and Found

Policy says hold it thirty days. He holds it ninety. Nobody has ever asked him why.

For thirty-one years, Moss Iqbal has kept what other people left behind at Chicago Union Station. A wedding ring in a potato chip bag. A child’s inhaler. Four skeins of yarn for a baby who hadn’t been born yet. Every object is logged in a hardbound ledger, held long past the point where anyone should reasonably keep it, on the chance that somebody comes back.

Because that is what Moss believes, and he has built a life on it: things wait. A thing put down is not a thing lost.

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