short story (writing practice): The Histories

**Steve Conan Trustrum** · 08-27-2003, 07:58 PM

THE HISTORIES

I watched the light as it filtered through the glass ceiling of the sunroom, causing the thinning white hairs on my grandfather's head to glow. He sat there, his back pressed against the brown wicker of his chair, staring through the window at the gardens beyond.

Curling around the armrest of his chair, his left hand absently fingered the pattern of its weaving as his right supported his squared chin. A statue of thought. He seemed to be breathing in the light, swallowing it with his presence and exhaling it with a calm dignity.

Looking past him to the table beneath the window, I noticed a framed picture of my grandmother. His wife. She was young, a separate person from the one I had known. I searched that stranger's face for anything I might recognize. I realised, as the Sun revealed the image to me, that the woman in the photo was just a label, a collection of greys and whites that left no room for any belief in colour. My eyes searched every line of that young woman's face, forcing me to move my head from time to time so that I could alter the Sun's concealing glare on the frame's glass.

"What was she like, Grandpa?" I asked, still examining the picture, "Grandma, I mean.”

Slowly the statue crumbled and my grandfather returned. As he lifted his head from his chin his movements caught my eye and forced me to explore his face. Each line was a page, every wrinkle a paragraph in a story I would never get to read. I depended upon him to read it for me.

"She was a great woman,” he said with a heavy sigh, his voice trailing off as his eyes remained fixed on the flowers separated from him by the unreadable distance of the glass. "She always took the time to breath and to use her footsteps to their fullest.”

Releasing his grip on the armrest, I watched as he reached into the drawer of the small table that acted as pedestal for my grandmother's photograph. "You would barely remember her, of course" he stated while rummaging noisily through the treasures within the small drawer, "and yet you can see her within yourself ... if you choose to that is.”

With a final clanking of tiny memories, my grandfather closed the drawer and turned to me, his hand concealing something that he motioned for me to take.

Unravelling my hand, a tense trepidation came upon me as I realised without knowing that I had just entered a moment of future memory. Still, I outstretched my hand as my grandfather slowly dropped a round pocket watch into it. The timepiece was barely bigger than my childish palm. Shaped from soft gold, the lines of its surfaces’ designs were filled with years of dirt and its glass face was scratched from countless hardships.

"The watch is yours to keep," he whispered while observing my surprised reaction with timeless calm, although I was too busy examining the gilded treasure to notice at the time. "Your grandmother gave it to me on the day we married." I looked up as he settled back into his chair to stare out the window again, the statue returning to its vigil over the garden.

Slowly I twisted and turned the watch about in my hands, the chain sliding through my fingers, realising just how tarnished it had become with age. With the unconscious need of the young to tamper, I began scratching out some of the entrenched dirt when I heard my grandfather's gentle, rumbling voice telling me to stop.

"Let the watch be" he stated softly, the shadow beneath his mouth shifting with his words as the falling light shone down across his unmoving face. "That dirt is now a part of the watch, a part of its tale. Cleaning that dirt would be like asking you to return to infancy, to become beyond recognition.”

I now understood he had given me the pocket watch to possess forever, but not to own. I was to hold the watch for him and let it gather its dust, to let its face get scratched as I took it out and replaced it in the years to come. Looking at the lines of its face made me wonder what moments, what wondrous tales, were responsible for each. And what marvellous etchings and imperfections I would add to it with each new day.

For the first time I noticed the meticulous hands moving beneath the glass, progressing through the day and blindly stumbling from past into future as they had done for countless seconds before.

"The watch is yours to keep” repeated my father's father as his eyes looked down on me with determined fire, "but not so the legacy within. That is up to you to make on your own.”

Then, as though nothing had transpired all afternoon, he turned back to staring through the windows of the sunroom, out onto his wife’s prized flowerbeds.

I tried to follow his glaze but could not see exactly where in my grandmother's garden he was looking; no matter how I moved my head, the glare from the bright Sun upon the panes always managed to conceal what lay beyond.

**banshee** · 08-27-2003, 08:31 PM

steve

'as the Sun revealed the image to me'
'the Sun's concealing glare'
'the glare from the bright Sun upon the panes '

- wouldnt it be the sun, no caps?

"but not so the legacy within. That is up to you to make on your own.”

- wouldnt it be "That is up to you to make your own."

Nice story, Steve!

later days
Lia etc