Tommy was bored of waiting. He had thought running away was going to be far more exciting than this. If he only could have remembered how to get home, he would have left already, but he couldn't. He was just another lost little boy in the Land of Lost Things, hoping to be found.

He looked around the waiting room and at the other missing persons twiddling their thumbs. Tommy knew most of them would never be found, unless it was under some molester's floorboards slick with lotion or dead behind a dumpster with no pants on. If that was the future maybe it was better to be lost. He wondered if his parents had even looked for him.

A flash of white caught his eye. Some of the files from lost paperwork must have got loose again. Files that people wanted to lose, especially the incriminating ones like dodgy tax returns and adulterous love letters, were always running rampant.  They were fun to try and catch because they had a bad habit of disappearing as soon as they were in reach. Tommy scoped up the paper, slightly disappointed it had been so easy. The paper was old, like one of the ancient scrolls in Missing Artefacts, but when he unrolled it, sepia letters and lines blossomed on the page, revealing a map titled, "The Way Home".

"What's that?" asked Suz, an annoying, blonde girl two years younger than Tommy as she snatched it from his grasp. Immediately, the words darkened to a girlish magenta and flowers sprouted in the corners. The map read, "To Grandmother's House". Suz's eyes turned glassy and her mouth gaped in surprise and hope.  She was attracting far too much attention from the other missing persons.

"Come on Suz, let's go someplace to talk."

They sprinted past a stinking blob of lost weight and startled the pack of missing dogs which had been feeding from its slimy snail trail. They ducked around a hill of missing socks then hid behind a plateau of jingling lost keys hoping the sound would block out their whispers.

They agreed that sharing the map with the other missing was a bad idea and that the adults would probably use it to look for something stupid like youth or money, or fame, where Suz and Tommy would use it to get home. Because Suz was younger, and because she had proclaimed she would rat Tommy out to the other missing if he didn't, they agreed to go to her Grandmother's first.

They set out immediately. If Suz got hungry or tired, sometimes the map would change, leading them to places to sleep and eat. Sometimes the journey was hard, but at least it was exciting, and it turned out the search for excitement had been the reason they had both run away in the first place.

Tommy began to notice that the longer they walked, the older they grew, as if the years they had spent missing had finally found them. Suz's hair darkened and she grew taller and more curvy. Tommy's voice deepened and stubble lined his chin and he struggled to remember why he ever thought Suz was annoying. Suz took to calling him Tom and they started holding hands as they followed the map.

Eventually they spied the red roof of Suz's grandmother's house peeking through the trees. Their journey had been both too short and too long. 

"I guess this is it," Suz said sadly, passing the map to Tom. "Is your home a long way from here?" she asked as he unrolled it. The magenta lines darkening to brown at his touch. A little red roof sprouted next to an X marked Suz.

"It says I'm already home."