One snowy morning, a single red glove lay on the bridge, bright against the white, like a small dropped flag, its palm turned up as if it were asking for something. A boy on his way to school picked it up and hung it on the railing, so that its owner could find it. Later a woman hurrying to work noticed it and moved it to a lamp post, a little higher, where it could be seen from farther away. The next day the baker, who passed the bridge on his way to open the shop, pinned it to a fence with a note: "Is this yours?"
Weeks went by, and the snow melted. One day in spring a girl called Noor walked past the fence and stopped. She recognized the glove immediately: it was her grandfather's. He had lost it in the winter, but he was too shy to tell anyone that he missed it. Noor took it home and put it back in his hands, and he said nothing, only turned it over a few times, as if checking that it was all there. None of the strangers who had moved the glove ever found out how the story ended. It was a good story, even so, and every one of them had written a line of it, without ever meeting the others, in the plain handwriting of kindness.