The rain was an old friend in this city, a persistent nag against the windowpane of my office. It usually brought the sad cases: missing cats, cheating spouses, insurance scams.
Tonight it brought her. A dame in a green silk dress that looked like it cost more than my entire apartment building.
"I need you to find something, Mr. Marlowe," she said, her voice like gravel soaked in honey.
"Name's not Marlowe, sweetheart," I corrected, leaning back in my squeaky chair. "Just Finn."
She placed a photo on my desk. It wasn’t a person. It was a statue: a small, ugly jade hummingbird with a cracked wing.
"It belonged to my father," she said. "Stolen last night."
The statue was worthless on the market, but its sentimental value was currency I understood. I took the job.
I found the hummingbird at 'The Drowned Anchor,' a dive bar where the gin tasted like regret and the patrons looked like they’d already lost everything they owned. The guy who lifted it was a small-time dealer named Sticky Pete.
I found Pete huddled in a booth, trying to trade the jade bird for a shot of cheap whiskey. He hadn't known its story. He just thought it looked lucky.
I bought Pete a better drink and walked out with the bird.
When I gave the statue back to the dame in the green dress, she didn't offer me money. She opened the cracked wing of the hummingbird. Inside was a rolled-up microfiche file. Proof that her father hadn't died in a car accident; he'd been silenced by City Hall.
She left my office without a word. I stared at the rain outside, the cheap whiskey burning my throat. The lucky hummingbird had just bought me a world of trouble, and it was last call.
4. The Color Collector (Literary/Microfiction)
He collected the colors others threw away. The pale, anxious yellow of exam season. The sudden, startling crimson of a first flush. The deep, mourning indigo of twilight in winter.
He kept them in glass jars on a shelf by his window. When his own world turned gray and flat, he would open a jar and breathe in the vibrant hue, borrowing the emotion he lacked. One day, a little girl noticed his collection.
"What is that one?" she asked, pointing to an empty jar labeled simply "Joy."
He sighed. That one was the hardest to capture. "That," he told her, "is one you have to make yourself." She smiled, a bright, pure light. He quickly capped an empty jar nearby, labeling it "Her Smile," and placed it right next to "Joy."
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