“The Man in the Grey Hoodie”

It began on a Tuesday. One of those dry, beige Tuesdays where the sky is too pale to care.

Marla sat in the cafeteria of her office building, poking at a vending machine sandwich. She was two weeks past the deadline to hand in her resignation, four months into insomnia, and six years into forgetting what it was she used to love. She wasn’t suicidal. She was just... done. Like someone still on the treadmill but not moving.

The noise of the city outside was distant, like a dream you can’t remember.

That’s when she saw him.

He wasn’t doing anything. Just sitting alone at the edge of the park bench beyond the glass window, grey hoodie up, face shadowed. He was watching a pigeon.

Not feeding it. Not photographing it. Just watching it the way people used to watch campfires. Like there was a secret there.

Marla sipped her coffee. Looked away. Looked back. Still there. He hadn’t moved.

The next day, he was there again. Same hoodie. Same bench. Same pigeon. Different sandwich. Tuna maybe.

She asked the barista if he knew the guy. “What guy?”

She pointed.

No one was there.

“…Huh,” she muttered. “Weird.

That night, her dream was strange. She was in her old backyard as a child, barefoot in damp grass. Something moved behind the garden shed—a shape in grey. She turned, but it was only the wind. Only the scent of rain in dry dirt.

The next morning, she found herself walking a longer route to work. She told herself it was for the fresh air.

The man was there again, hoodie up, watching a squirrel now. There was something about his stillness. It wasn’t passive. It was... alert. Like he was waiting for something only nature could say.

Marla sat at the other end of the bench, pretending to check her phone.

After five minutes, he nodded once. Slow. Almost imperceptible.

She blinked. “Hi,” she said. Her voice sounded odd to her.

He didn’t answer. Just turned his head slightly toward a tree nearby. An ordinary tree. Maple maybe. She squinted at it like it might reveal something.

Then he stood and walked off.

“Hey—wait, do I know you?” she called after him.

He didn’t turn back.

But taped to the bench where he’d been sitting was a note.

One line, handwritten.

“The truth is at the end of your nose.”

She stared at it for a long time. Laughed, bitterly. "That's... not helpful," she muttered, crumpling the note and shoving it in her pocket.

But for some reason, that day, she didn’t go to the office. She walked to the park instead. Sat under the maple. Watched the squirrels. Watched her breath. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat without trying to be productive.

Her phone buzzed three times. She didn’t answer.

A breeze passed through the leaves.

For just a second, it felt like the world stopped pretending.

And in that moment—shorter than a blink—Marla remembered something not in words. A feeling. The shape of how it felt to want to live. To move. To survive. Not just exist.

She stood up. Went home. Canceled the resignation letter.

She still didn’t know what was next.

But she had started walking again.

She never saw the man in the grey hoodie again.

But sometimes, when the light hit the trees just right, or when the pigeons cooed too softly for the world to notice, she would feel it:

The nod. The whisper. The prompt.

The druid had passed.

And the code had restarted.