The Old Man and the Boy
Tell me a story, the boy said. He was sitting on the floor and the fire was hot behind him and the flames were in his eyes and the old man thought he looked like he’d just been born, born at the age he was with all the world lying before him.
A story, said the old man.
Yes, said the boy. He smiled and his hands were folded on his knees and he was stretching upward like he thought being closer would make the story come faster.
And it would, the old man thought. He folded his own hands and he looked at the fire and he heard the winter outside. It was the heart of winter in the mountains and the wind was bringing the clouds down and filling the pass and they were still awake because there would not be school the next day. The man watched the fire on the wood, the shine off the rafters, the flickering movement on the black panes of the windows.
A story, he thought. What a damn request that is. He sat and the chair was suddenly not under him anymore and he wanted to tell the boy about the war. He wanted to tell him about coming up the road to the camp, the snow caking their boots, the frost on their lips and on their eyes, the cold in the barrels of their guns. About the way the sun felt like it had died, as they came up that road, as they saw the beaten trees and the scared ditches and then the chain fence around the camp with its abandoned gun towers like the skeletons of giants. About how they came to that fence and there were bodies behind it, corpses, smaller skeletons that were standing and breathing and watching them come. Men who were dead but who were not yet dead. How they came up to the fence and opened the gate and then, only then, the men realized that the other soldiers were truly gone. He wanted to tell the boy how they’d wrapped those men in their blankets and taken them out to meet the trucks and how the men had been looking back both with hate and with longing, because of what they’d left there.
But he couldn’t, the old man knew. He couldn’t. So he said: Once Upon a Time. And he told the boy about a knight who’d never lived and how he’d saved a town full of people who’d never lived from a fire-breathing dragon who’d never lived. He told the boy how that imaginary knight had killed the dragon and ended its fire and thrown its bones into the lake, and how the people the knight had saved had watched those bones sink with both hate and with longing.
When he was done, the old man sat back and the chair had returned and it was hard against his back and he could feel the snow still caking his feet and the fire warming his face at the same time. He sat and he remembered the way they’d brought those broken men to meet the trucks, and, when he looked down, the little boy had fallen asleep on the rug and the light was in his hair.
I want Mr. Schlosser to be recognized for a great FF here. Too many times we look at Tumblr and only click the oversaturated symbolic heart for the mindless shit of the internet. In fact, it seems that most “<3”s are given to people who reblog cute cats and rascle dogs, maybe some sort of food representative of our impending triple bypass. Sometimes we like videos of obscure rock bands that we pretend to like in order to be “cool”, or fleeting colloquialisms of our time that represent our jaded sentiments of existentialism. Other times we click the heart because Our Mutual Friend is sharing a Coke with a New Yorker in a New York office building. Nonetheless, we miss out on the real pieces of gold because we’re too busy trying to glorify internet garbage instead of enrich our minds with the wealth of knowledge our immediate friends have to share with us. In a roundabout and longwinded way, I want to say, great work, Jon.
