TIME THIEF

She took it.  I knew she was going to the minute she sat down next to me in the airport.  She looked at me with large round eyes and a stupid smile that was probably meant to be cute and disarming.  It may have been cute once upon a time, like when she was around the age of 7, but now, not so much.  I’m thinking that maybe the guy with her had her convinced she was still cute but I didn't think she was cute and I wished she stop looking at me with those big stupid eyes.  She was trying to come off as innocent but I knew, from years of traveling, that she was a practiced beggar and sure enough she took it.  The thing about people like her, they do that sort of thing for so long that they don’t even see it as stealing, maybe just relieving you of something they needed more than you.  I, however, needed mine, and I gave her a hard discouraging stare at the onset but she easily had twenty more years of practice than I did and she didn’t even blink.  Later she dashed off when a voice on a loudspeaker made it’s usual announcement about not leaving your things unattended and not accepting anything from people you don’t know or whatever it is they say exactly, the point was that suddenly she was gone.  I sat there wanting to sink in my chair as I surveyed my magazine and few worldly possessions and I knew I’d been robbed of the thing which had come to mean the most to me after the difficult months I’d just had: my precious time.

BIO: Rhonda M. Smolarek hides writes under the nom de plume of Olive Rosehips, where she makes up things all the while using proper grammer and spell checks.  She generally does this in stiletto's with her pedicure in vivid shades of red. Why? Don't ask me, I just work here. Word is she also does website design/re-design at OliveRosehips.com  and plays at getting absurd songs stuck in people's minds in order to amuse herself... I know, right?