The metro doors hissed open at Jaume I, and she stepped out, immediately colliding with a man holding a paper bag. Apples scattered across the platform—six of them, rolling in different directions like escaped planets.
"Perdó," they said simultaneously, then switched to English with the awkward recognition of fellow foreigners.
They chased the apples together. She caught three, he retrieved two, and the sixth disappeared under a bench where neither could reach. When they straightened up, slightly breathless, he held out the bag and she dropped hers in without thinking.
"Thank you," he said, and she noticed his hands were shaking.
"Are you okay?"
He looked at the apples, then at her. "My daughter's teacher said to bring six apples for a classroom experiment. Something about fractions." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "I'm usually better at this. Her mother always—" He stopped.
The platform was emptying. Another train would arrive in three minutes.
"There's a fruit stand," she said, "just outside the Gothic Quarter exit. Two minutes from here."
"I know." He shifted the bag to his other hand. "I've been standing on this platform for twenty minutes. Rode past this stop twice already."
She understood then—not the details, but the shape of it. The weight of showing up alone to something that used to be we. The performance of normal in front of small eyes.
"Buy seven," she said. "Tell her you brought an extra, just in case someone forgot theirs."
His expression shifted. "That's—yes. That's good."
The display board flickered: two minutes.
"She'll remember that," she added. "Not that there were six. That you thought of seven."
He nodded slowly, and this time when he smiled, something in his shoulders loosened. "Thank you."
She watched him take the stairs two at a time toward the exit, the paper bag clutched against his chest. The sixth apple was still under the bench, and she left it there—someone else's unexpected discovery.
When her train arrived, she didn't board. She stood on the platform, thinking about all the ordinary days that ask us to be extraordinary, and how sometimes a stranger's kindness is the rehearsal we need before the actual performance.
#flashfiction #Barcelona #kindness #moments