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<\/a><\/h1>\nHe Wanders Lonely<\/h1>\n
by Frank Joussen<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cCloud\u201d isn\u00b4t his real name, of course. It is \u201cClaude\u201d. But his new classmates in idyllic Chester have never met a French exchange student before and got him wrong. They have never bothered giving it another thought. They are sure that his name is \u201cCloud\u201d, but that doesn\u00b4t mean you should ridicule him for it; he is a Frenchman after all.<\/p>\n
Another teenager might laugh it off \u2013 maybe thinking that the English are too stupid to speak French or maybe looking on the bright side: if you have to have a nickname to belong, \u201cCloud\u201d isn\u00b4t such a bad one. But Claude, who would found a pessimist club if pessimists were into clubs at all, starts brooding over this new label: \u201cNo fresh start for me,\u201d he ponders, \u201ckids away from home also see me as the only one who can\u00b4t laugh about a joke. They\u00b4ll soon find me out as the one who never dances at a party, but comforts the saddest girl for hours \u2013 until she walks away with somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what is there to do for him tonight? – He takes his favorite book, wanders as lonely as an old Romantic poem through the English rain \u2013 through the medieval streets of Chester, through the gate of the historic town wall and onto the bridge from which his foreign classmates always jump into the River Dee out of sheer joy in summer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
###<\/p>\n
Frank Joussen is a German school teacher. His short stories and poems have appeared in print magazines and ezines in ten different English-speaking countries.He is currently looking for poems and prose pieces? for an international anthology on “family matters”.<\/p>\n
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?Cloud? isn?t his real name, of course. It is ?Claude?. But his new classmates in idyllic Chester have never met a French exchange student before and got him wrong. They have never bothered giving it another thought. They are sure that his name is ?Cloud?, but that doesn?t mean you should ridicule him for it; he is a Frenchman after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1944"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2325,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944\/revisions\/2325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}