When the child took the old man’s hand and squeezed it,
two lights in the basement of that downtown library
exploded. Some of the older computers
shut down, too.

They just stopped working, but that whole
building had always been a fire hazard punch line amongst
the hard-drinking volunteers at The Knife Fight Café.
So no one really cared when something sighed and then laid very still,
caught fire or seemed to be possessed by a very jaded,
borderline suicidal devil from those days of wooden graveyards
and cigarette machines on city buses.

The old man remembers those demons. He remembers those graveyards
and almost always bought Pall Mall Blues from the number twenty-seven
that always missed
his stop on Cowichan Boulevard by half a block.

He’s ninety-two and has been coming
to the library since his wife passed twenty years ago,
and his kids took to one of those underground cities.

It’s not an obsession, but he still wanted to see
if he could read every book,
every old newspaper available on all six floors.

Only part of his ambition dealt in a hope for knowledge.
Only a sliver of his desire wanted more than he needed.

The routine was a good one, cool and slow to a perfect pace.
The life was finally an easy gain. He kept this up
for twenty years and felt a little bit better,
a little less unhappy and a little wiser every day.

He ran into that kid on the last day. He was seven,
dressed in modern clothes but looking a little too old for that
in the way he eyed the books as he made his way towards him.

For a while the old man tried to ignore him. He had gotten used
to people passing by forever. Having that change
for no good reason
wasn’t appealing at all.

The child talked for an hour.

That was all it took for the old man to realize
that this kid was much older and a lot smarter.
He realized this after about ten minutes,
spending the rest of his time afterwards learning to live
with a broken heart.

When the child was finished talking
he offered him his hand,
and he took it because he just wanted to go home
to fix every broken appliance in his house.

That was when he understood. It was around the time
those lights exploded and those computers stopped trying. The child grinned
and walked away, leaving him to be the only one who could see
hundreds of books fly off the shelves and ghosts
doing everything from screaming at taxi drivers to laughing at drunks.

Classic cars rained from the sky without doing any damage

It took forever for him to get back outside.
When he did there was so much to take in
that he felt dizzy and grabbed his chest.

The heart attack started
but never finished,
and he eventually had to learn to live with that.

01/20/2010

Posted on 01/20/2010
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard