"The Boy Who Collected Broken Things"

I Saw My Future in a Stranger’s Tattoo

Jude was the boy who collected broken things.

Your Ahmar

A cracked marble here, a torn kite there, bits of rusty watches, lopsided buttons, bottle caps with faded logos, and once, even a shattered mirror shard no bigger than a coin. He didn’t know why he picked them up—only that they whispered to him, each one humming a faint, invisible story only he could hear. They were forgotten things, like him. Alone but still clinging to meaning.

Jude lived in the old part of town, the kind people drove through but never stopped in. His parents were shadows—his mother lost in pills, his father lost to wherever men go when they forget how to stay. So Jude wandered the streets after school, his backpack heavy with more memories than math books.

One gray afternoon, as storm clouds curled above the rooftops, Jude found something different. Not plastic. Not glass. But paper. Soft, damp, and darkened with smears of red. It was lying under a park bench, barely protected by the slats. A diary.

Blood stained the corner.

He hesitated, staring at it, the wind pushing hair into his eyes. Then he picked it up.

The diary was leather-bound, warm somehow. It hummed louder than anything he’d ever collected. Inside, the handwriting was neat but frantic, slanted as if written in fear or urgency. The entries weren’t dated—just numbers. Codes. Names. Some pages were torn out. Others had single lines scribbled:

> “The fox comes when I sleep.”

“The door must not be opened again.”

“He wears the cabin on his arm.”

Jude shivered.

He turned the page and gasped. A drawing. Inked in black: a crescent moon, a cabin under it, mountains behind, and a fox curled near the door.

It was the same tattoo he’d seen on the man at the train station.

Two days earlier, Jude had taken the train for the first time. He’d been watching people—imagining the stories behind their coats and bags—when the man sat across from him. Mid-thirties. Quiet eyes. A camera bag and that tattoo.

Jude hadn’t stared long, just enough to feel the image burn into his memory. He thought it was beautiful then—now, it felt like a warning.

He clutched the diary tighter and ran home.

---

For two days, Jude couldn’t sleep. He reread the entries, memorizing the strange phrases. Something pulled at him, a thread unraveling from somewhere deep inside. On the third day, he returned to the station.

The man was there again—same coat, same calm. He sat on a bench, sipping coffee, eyes scanning the tracks.

Jude approached, hands shaking. “Mister?”

The man looked up. “Yeah?”

“That tattoo… on your arm…”

The man rolled up his sleeve casually. “This one?”

Jude nodded.

“I saw it in a dream once,” the man said. “Had it inked the next day. Strange, huh?”

Jude pulled the diary from his backpack, slowly handing it over.

The man took it, flipped through the pages, then froze. “Where did you get this?”

“Under a bench,” Jude whispered. “By the park.”

The man’s voice lowered. “This belonged to my brother.”

A pause.

“He disappeared a year ago. Everyone thought he just… left. But I didn’t believe that. He was paranoid near the end—said dreams were bleeding into reality. That something from the dream world was following him.”

Jude stared at the tattoo. “The fox… the cabin… You saw it too?”

The man nodded. “Every night for weeks. My brother drew it first. Then I started seeing it too.”

“Do you think…” Jude hesitated. “Do you think dreams can come true?”

The man smiled sadly. “I think dreams are warnings. Clues. Sometimes prophecies.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Then Jude said, “Everything I collect… it speaks to me. Like this diary. I think it wanted to be found.”

The man gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Maybe it chose you.”

Jude shifted in his seat. “There’s one more page,” he said. “At the back.”

The man opened to the final page. In shakier handwriting, it read:

> “The boy with the fox-heart will finish what I started. He’ll find the truth under the cabin.”

The man paled. “He used to call me the fox. But you…”

Jude lifted his sleeve. On his pale forearm, in black marker, he had drawn the same tattoo. Not perfectly, but close enough.

“I didn’t know why,” Jude said. “It felt right.”

The man looked at him, eyes wide, then placed a hand on Jude’s shoulder. “I think you’re part of something bigger than both of us.”

---

Later that week, they traveled together. North, toward the mountains. Toward a cabin the man hadn’t seen in real life but claimed existed.

Jude didn’t know what waited under the cabin.

He only knew the broken things he carried weren’t broken after all.

They were clues.

And this time, they were leading him home