Like two forces of nature, my grandpa and the concrete post -
older than the fading movie posters - watched the town transformed,
roads asphalted, children turn adults, bringing their off-spring to buy
from him a stick of bitter black chewing gum.
Lone by his cart, he bid the dead farewell and greeted the newborn,
himself aging and bending. Creases sprouted in his face, around his
dimming sights, and in his white and delicate hands.
My grandfather had one love: my grandmother. A ravishing, proud,
raven-haired woman. A framed retouched photo of her hung, imposing, on
one of the walls. In it she stood, defiant, leaning on a carved pillar
in a faraway place. This is how he must have seen her at first: a
mysterious, sad-eyed disparity between dark and fair. Thus he fell in
love and made her his only world.
This woman sat by his side, adjacent to his azure pushcart, day in and
day out. She said nothing and he remained mute. They just stared with
vacuous eyes, perhaps away, perhaps inside, perhaps back, to previous
abodes in bustling cities.
At first, she seemed to like being his sidekick, confidently doling
confectionery to toddlers, whose mothers remained forever infants in
her memory. Intermittently, she laid a shrivelled hand on his venous
knee, leaving it there for a split, fluttering, second, conveying
warmth and withdrawing as unobtrusively.
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