OLD

by
Stephen J. Golds

Samuel sat on a bench and looked at his hands. He had always had large hands but now the skin was creased and ruffled like the soiled sheets of a deathbed. The flesh was yellow with sun and nicotine stains. He was tired and his hands shook steadily with the fatigue of age. He was old, tired and used and everyone knew it. The birds that screeched from the naked, dead trees knew it. The children holding their mothers hands told him they knew it with their large soggy eyes. The black stray dog that sniffed and pissed at the litterbin knew it and Samuel knew it. Samuel knew it most of all.

Everyone that he had known was gone. Left or dead. Discarded. Now he waited for something to come along to break the days away from the nights. He had left his room in the bed-sit this morning. The bed-sit filled his stomach with dry gravel and shit and it scared him. The people there didn’t speak to him, they scuttled to and from their rooms like Death-watch beetles filling the halls with their stale stenches. He would lay in his bed at night surrounded by brown greasy walls, grabbing at his chest, hacking dust from his throat in green and bloody drippings, listening to the noises that the people made in their dark holes around him. Laughing, creaking, creeping, moaning, coughing. Sometimes Samuel would crouch on the floor with his ear to the carpet and listen to their voices mixing together, humming machinery in chorus. He was always in darkness.

During the days he walked around town, he went to charity shops and brought books and junk he didn’t want just so he could hold a straggled and uncomfortable conversation with the white haired women at the tills. Today Samuel sat on the bench and looked at everything that he had seen a thousand times before. The same people, the identical colours, the repeated cars. The women at the charity shops thought he was an old fool, he could tell by the way they looked at him with distant concrete coloured eyes over their inexpensive spectacles. Samuel didn’t want to see their diminished faces they reminded him too much of the crusty old cunts of whores. Most of them all they reminded him too much of himself.

He stood up from the bench and his knees creaked in disgust, he decided he would walk back towards town and feed the scavenging birds at the lake. He walked and time ripped small pieces of him away as he struggled against a day with no breeze and only an unforgiving cigarette burn in the sky. He let small pieces of him fall away like crumbling ash. His tongue had shrivelled up and was rotting in his mouth, he hadn’t used it now for so long. When he got there he was very tired and stood at the edge of the lake and looked at the dirty green water. Everything used to be so pure but everything had decayed and dulled with his body and, he supposed, his mind. He threw whole slices of bread into the slimy water and watched the birds peck dementedly at them. The birds had beady black eyes that watched him carefully and as he threw the slices of bread from Tesco supermarket he wished he had a pellet gun. A pellet for each eye he thought. He imagined the dead birds floating fortresses of feathers, souless and eyeless. Discarded.

The lake was empty and no one was around. There was no fishermen, no kids, no parents, no noises. He was alone with the round black oil droplet eyes that stabbed into him like electric shocks.

“They’re Canadian geese. My daddy says they’re tourists”

Samuel’s body rippled suddenly, he shuddered and he dropped the remaining bread out of his lizard-like hands and into the water. He turned and looked at a small girl. A beautiful small creature. The first thing he noticed was the way the sun glimmered off of her hair like it was mirrored or metal. He looked at the sun in her hair and looked around the lake to see where the small girl had come from. There was no one around and Samuel guessed the child’s parents must be in the car park or the public toilets, which was an old piss smelling brick building by the car park. He looked at the girls face. She was squinting up at him and her eyes looked like small hairy caterpillars. She was smiling at him and he noticed that her teeth were very small and delicate like small bones. She was wearing pink dungarees over a small blue t-shirt which had what looked like cartoon mice playing hide and seek.

“Did you know that?”

Her words came quickly and he noticed how confident she was in her youth and innocence. She was young and yet to be broken and corrupted and chipped away at.

“Yes” his words crawled out of his throat and broke in the sunny air.

“Yeah what?”

“Yes. I knew what they were”

Samuel felt a smile break across his face and it was a painful pleasure that he wished he could feel more often. It had been a long time since he had smiled. The small angel like girl continued to squint up at him but now she held a small milky coloured hand to her forehead in a saluting gesture, shielding her eyes from the brightness that burnt them both. Samuel thought tt was as though they were two matches burning together and smiled again.

“Your teeth are very yellow. Do you not brush them?”

The old man chuckled from his chest and felt a little less hollow. The girl giggled a high pitched laugh that made Samuel think of mermaids and pixies and other make believe creatures.

“Where are your parents missy?” he asked her as he bent over and fished the plastic packet of bread from the lake. He picked it from the green mouldy water with his thumb and forefinger and dropped it to the dirt in between himself and the girl. His back cracked as he straightened and he hid the pain behind a subtle grimace.

“They are there. My daddy owns the pub. I‘m allowed out here to feed the ducks.”

She pointed towards the pub by the almost empty car park.

Samuel nodded as though he had expected the answer she gave. He fingered the soaked plastic bag open and fished out the last two slices of bread and offered the cupid like child a piece to feed the ducks with. She took a piece and he noticed her tiny pearl coloured fingernails and her clean unmarked skin. They stood side by side breaking pieces of bread into small pieces and throwing them at the ducks. Every so often Samuel looked out of the corner of his eye at the girl and he could feel the blood sliding through his veins and his heart pumped stronger then it had in a long time.

The girl didn’t speak and the only sounds that hovered around them were the sounds of disturbed water and excited birds. Samuel could hear the motorway buzzing in the distance far away and he could hear his own heartbeat.

When the bread had all gone the girl wiped her hands clean on the chest of her dungarees and tilted her petit chin towards his crumpled and destroyed face.

“Gotta go now. Nice to meet you. Goodbye.”

Samuel felt the gravel and shit in his stomach return and twist heavily in his stomach. He grabbed at the angels wrist. It was small and slim and fit into his hand like a puzzle piece. The girl stopped and looked at him again. Hairy caterpillars in her face and a salute to his decayed foolishness, he thought feeling the shit harden in the pit of his guts.

“Wait. I can get some more bread, don’t go yet, its still early. You don’t want the duckies to go hungry do you?”

The girl pulled her wrist free and shook her head violently from side to side and began to walk away. Samuel looked at her golden fiery head and grabbed at the back of her pink dungarees. His hands were trembling and he could feel his heart stretching in his chest. An old soaked dishrag. The girl screamed a high pitched squeal and he put his large clawed hand over her small mouth to stop the noises from escaping across the lake. He held her tight against him as she shook and rolled in his tightening grip.

“Its okay. Its okay. Its okay. I’m not one of those. I’m not a bad man. I just want to talk that’s all. I just want to talk a little while longer”.

Many moments passed and the tiny frame had stopped moving and had relaxed. He removed his hand from her mouth. The hand was bloody and moist from her broken voice. She fell limply to the floor and her small delicate face exploded into the mud. The sun still glimmered in her hair but he saw now that her eyes were open, two small globes of wet blue flames. Samuel rubbed his palm onto his brown trousers and looked at her bloody broken jaw. He looked around quickly and saw a man wearing a blue jacket walking a black dog across the other side of the lake. He stood up and walked away as quickly as he tired old legs could move beneath him.

He walked very quickly. His breath came very hard in short raspy breaths. His tongue tasted of old copper coins. He didn’t look behind him. He felt warm tears trickling down his cracked face and walked quickly away.

© Stephen J. Golds
Reproduced with permission