Litchi

Litchi started out at the coat check of a hushed cocktail bar, the kind of place where people speak low and coats cost months of salary. They’d hand him jackets; what they were really handing over were entire lives — keys, letters, jewelry boxes, secrets stitched into linings. He filed everything away without a word, returned everything without a single mistake, and his memory for pockets became a whispered legend: they say he knows the contents of the city better than the city knows itself. His shyness did the rest — who’d ever suspect a voice made of tissue paper?

He only truly wakes once night falls: by day, he’s a silhouette apologizing for existing; past ten in the evening, he’s a presence — pearly, precise, indispensable. In the dim light of the clubs, he moves without stirring the air, slips from one lounge to another like a guest nobody saw come in, and his worth tracks the same curve as the moon: the later the hour, the more irreplaceable he becomes. At dawn, he hands back his apron and his voice, and turns almost invisible again — until the next evening.

A fear of everything, fought off every night with one simple method: doing it anyway. He trembles before every shift and never during; he’s checked his anxiety like a coat at the counter, ticket and all, to pick back up on his way out. In the slow hours, he strings pearls onto a bracelet only to take it apart again, just to keep his hands busy. And if the House ever needs someone to slip through where no door will open, it already knows Litchi gets in everywhere — places, like people, never suspect a whisper.