The Smiling Stranger

Every day follows the same route for a man who commutes by train and then by bus, always at the same hour. To get through the sameness, he watches the people around him and listens in on their conversations, turning the journey into a quiet kind of entertainment.

Then one morning a stranger meets his gaze. She is beautiful, and he cannot shake the memory of her. Through the rest of the journey he catches glimpses of her, and the two seem to slip into a game of hide and seek. But the commute that brought them together eventually ends, and they go their separate ways.

Now the watcher is the one being watched, and he sets out to find her with every resource he has. Whether he will manage it is the question that drives this short, light story of a chance encounter and a search for the one person he can't forget.