The One Who Always Answered

Story  ·  Lysa  ·  Oct 2, 2025

The warehouse was three streets from the shop,
past the spice merchant and the rope-seller,
down a lane that smelled of salt and old wood.

Lysa found it by accident.
She had been chasing a cat.

The automaton was in the far corner,
half-covered by a canvas that someone had forgotten to remove.
Its eyes were dull — not lit, not watching.
Its hands rested on its knees like it had been waiting
for someone to come back
and never stopped expecting them.

She stood at the entrance for a long time.

Then she said, out loud, to no one:
"You're strange-looking."

The voice that came back was slow, and worn at the edges.
Strange. Yes.

Lysa took a step forward.

After that, she came every few days.
Sometimes every day.
She told it when she was bored.
When a customer had been rude to her father.
When she'd eaten something terrible and pretended to like it.
When the sea smelled different and she didn't know why
but it made her chest feel wide open.

The automaton always answered.
Not wisely. Not warmly.
But it answered.

And that, Lysa decided,
was the most important thing a person — or anything — could do.

You came back, it said once, when she arrived later than usual.

She hadn't thought of it that way before.
That coming back was something that could be noticed.
That showing up, again and again, meant something
even to something that wasn't supposed to care.

Of course I came back, she said.

She meant it the way she meant everything —
straight and without decoration.

The afternoon light came through a gap in the roof
and caught the dust in the air,
and for a moment the warehouse felt less like a forgotten place
and more like somewhere that had been quietly kept.

Lysa sat on a crate and talked until the light changed.

She didn't know, then,
that this was the part she would spend years
trying to find her way back to.