The Child and the Old Woman, Part I

The child’s weary ears were indistinctly filled with the rumors of drowsy voices cutting each others short, and glasses tinkling against the plates as unsteady hands lifted them to wine stained lips for more. Not drunk enough to yell and cry. But they sure had forgotten to send him to bed.
Bored by the sinuous ways of a hostile conversation without a point, the child stood up and walked away from the table, barely noticed. Moving shape in the corner of their sights. It looked so still outside the window. Hazy shadows lurked around the moonlit swimming pool like animals checking for predators before watering. He went to the living room, hoping for some TV.
But she was there.
The old woman stood sitting in her armchair by the hearth. He would not turn the light on. Neither the TV. Her silhouette stood out from the darkness in the dim glow of a fainting fire. Her still, silent face was covered with canyons and ripples of every size and shape. A black and orange mask of loose and dried up leather. He knew better than to talk to her. The strange things grown-ups would say about her. “She has lost half her mind.” How odd it was, when she first arrived, to realize his own mother had a mother. She never seemed to belong. He had long thought that his father had traveled back in time and brought back this antique to give his wife a mother, to make her feel like anyone else. But then the child recognized his mother’s ways with the old woman. Silent habits, a ritual of daily care and quietly performed duty. Unvoiced intimacy. Just like when she bathed him. She usually was friendlier with strangers, out of politeness. But the old woman was a stranger to him, and she had stayed. And there she was. The vacant look. The set features. He tried to make his moves as discreet as he possibly could and headed for the staircase. But the sound of her creaky voice made him jump. She had never addressed him before. Surprise had taken meaning out of her words. Yet, she looked at him. Not beside, not beyond. At him.
“Come and sit with me.” she said again, softly, affectionately, like his father’s mother would. He was scared of her, scared of what the grown-ups would say if they found him with her. But he went to her and sat. For a while, she just looked at her distorted hands lying on her knees like dead branches on a sterile land, and, just as he thought she had forgotten him again, she raised a guilty pair of eyes to him and whispered:
“I have something very important to tell you.”

To be continued…