In a quaint village nestled between rolling hills and winding rivers, there lived a man who spent his days perched upon a weathered wooden chair on the front porch of his modest cottage. His eyes, a mirror to the vast expanse of his thoughts, gazed blankly into the distance as if searching for something just beyond the edge of his consciousness.

The man's mind was a void, a vast emptiness that seemed to swallow up any stray thought or fleeting emotion that dared to cross its threshold. He sat there, unmoving, a solitary figure against the backdrop of the bustling village around him.

Neighbors passing by would stop and exchange fleeting greetings with the man, but he hardly registered their presence. His mind was elsewhere, lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts and memories.

Some said he was a dreamer, a man who had wandered too far into the recesses of his own mind and had lost his way back to reality. Others whispered that he was haunted by ghosts from his past, memories that clung to him like shadows in the fading light of day.

But the man paid them no mind. He remained on his chair, a silent sentinel guarding the threshold between the known and the unknown, his gaze fixed on a horizon only he could see. And there he sat, lost in the vast emptiness of his mind, a solitary figure in a world that seemed to have forgotten him.

Despite not being born in Vorden, the man had been noticed by all his neighbors sitting on his worn, beloved chair on the peacefully secluded front porch of his cottage so frequently like clockwork that those passersby couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t there. The man people knew as Mr. Arne Oosting was a sentimental man. He was a more sentimental man than most thirty-five-year-old men like him were. He was a man born of simplicity and habit; he’d been told by many folks growing up that he took after his father in that way. Once, a traveling countryman stopped by his cottage, and he broke bread with them, and he enjoyed the stranger’s company. He told them that the chair he sat in was an old heirloom, crafted out of strong, hard ash wood. He remembered his father, for whom he was named, sitting on the same chair inside their small, one-room, sod house back in Drenth, smoking a tobacco pipe. His father talked of Neopolian and the Battle of Waterloo.

Occasionally, passersby would notice a gold wedding band worn on his left ring finger, but in all his four years of living there, they never saw a wife leave or return to his home.

He had a small box that had once been for women's shoes, filled with mementos of another time, sitting in his closet. It contained a hairpin, a recipe for cherry pie that she always used to make, a photo of them on their wedding day, and a pair of baby shoes that were never used. For Arne, death had proven to be a cruel thief. Before he was eighteen, both of his parents died of the flu. The Grim Reaper had visited him in Drenthe like a dark gray cloud, stealing the life of his poor, beautiful wife, Theodora. While in her prime, her life was snatched away as her own body was being torn violently asunder. The precious babe was born silent; he never cried, never drew breath. Like his mother, the precious babe was already gone; his life had been whisked away before any midwife could swaddle him.

It’d been fifteen years since they were buried in the rain, in the old churchyard, but his memories of their existence never faded. He thought of them daily, always trying to remember to smile for his wife.

Even on this hot day in June, he managed to smile as he listened for the carriage rattling up the road.