other
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He walked out onto the porch. The warm early evening air gently tagged his senses compelling a smile; he searched his pocket for a lighter. Children below were making their secret plans, but seeing grandpa ran towards the house. “Grandpa, Grandpa, tell us a poem” Grandpa often recited this very lengthy and amusing poems about heroes, far-away lands and ailing princesses. “No,” he said, “I just told you one recently”.”Then sing a song.” He tampered his roll, he just wanted a quiet taste of his new batch of tobacco from the new patch, so he said: “OK, I’m not going to sing a song, but I’ll tell you a story”-he leaned onto a post, thinking deeply, then his chest straightened. At that moment, a sun-ray peeked from behind a tree and lit his hair with a myriad of bright sparkles, children looking into his face with intense anticipation saw that he was not looking so old anymore, then he said: “Do you know, before I was a story-teller and singer of songs, I was a bottle collector?”-his timing was impeccable: children burst out laughing,
he lit his roll, and drawing it out of his mouth, gave it a look as he went on: “A few years back, I was called into a stranger’s house to help fix a motor. I wound up walking through a shed looking for the right tool, when I saw a very unusual bottle. I had never seen anything like that before. It was standing on the shelf above my head,
and was overtaken by cobwebs which seemed to have created an intricate design around it. Almost automatically I raised my hand to lift it out to give it a better look. I brought it close to my face. And then it happened: all I can remember now is the sound of shattering glass, of the content spilling everywhere and the sharp pain in my chest where a chip of the bottle embedded itself. I ran out, I kept running, I ran till I couldn’t run any longer. I fell. I stayed there.
I couldn’t sleep, my chest was throbbing with pain. I tried to pry the chip out only to cause myself more pain, I was afraid to push it further in, it’ll have to work itself out; but when I did sleep, I saw the broken bottle, I could also see its content – scraps of paper with scribbles all over; in my dream, I could read them: they were poems, bits of stories and even songs. I kept thinking about them as I wondered around; they comforted me, while my mind replayed questions “why this pain”, “when is it going away”, “why do I keep seeing this bottle”; and later: “is it mine”; I no longer could dismiss this as collecting. I slept to read more stories, to hear the songs. They spoke to me, they were me. I did not eat much, just picked some berries off bushes, I wandered around maniacally,… when I came across a couple of empty bottles… I stopped, looked, then picked them up, all the while saying to myself “I’ve picked this kind up a million times before”. By force of habit, I brought them back to my camp.
For the next couple of days and then a couple of days after, I examined them. No, they did not seem to me as the old run-of-the-mill throw-away bottles any longer: I thought about why they were there where I found them. And this bothered me: these bottles at the same time distracted me from and reminded me of my broken bottle. I picked them up and walked to a near-by road to leave them on a side: may be someone will notice them. I was almost all the way back to the camp, when I heard a garbage truck. In no time did I run back, and take these bottles back into the bushes where I found them. I felt hysteria setting in: “what if my story will have no ending, what if I am late?
Grandpa looked at the children. They were watching a bunch of ants overtake a large insect. “Will someone take dinner out of the oven!”- thundered grandma’s voice. She emerged out of the shed with scraps of paper in her hand: “Here, I found the ending”, she was trying to read her old scribbles.
At the dinner, everyone was quiet, even though no one quite knew why. Finally, grandpa wiped his mouth, got up, gave grandma a blank look, he then placed his plate over hers and took both dishes into the kitchen. “Children”- said grandma, straightening an enormous “beehive” on her head,: “there is an Ancient Mystery program I prepared for you, it is called “The Greatest story is told As Future Is Brought Into Being””, and she told them to go clean the kitchen. Children loved to visit grandma and grandpa, and were proud of them, for they knew: their “gramps” were their own Ancient Mystery.
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Love is an energy curve dictating behavior
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