Saturday 22 January 2022

For All that is Past.





Pedro is older than he looks, he takes care of himself physically so, on him, the years are hidden. His eyes still sparkle behind heavy framed glasses, and his unkempt greying beard make him look like a friendly rogue more than a pensioner.

 

Each day he thinks about taking his pension and each day he drives up to the empty parking spaces in his truck, gets out, stretches, picks up an unopened bin liner, a broom and a shovel.

 

He sweeps a cigarette packet onto the shovel and then slides shovel and packet into the new bin liner and then replaces the full bin liner on the wall by the hotel with the new one.

 

Filo drops the cigarette packet there every night after he rises from the bench that is behind the parking places. It is not a test; he does not do it consciously; it is just that he doesn’t think. He is thinking about Ella who works in the hotel. How did it go so wrong?

 

Pedro knows none of this; he just can’t understand why there is a cigarette packet in the same place every day. When he sees it he looks up at the window of his truck and shrugs.

 

On the dashboard on the other side of the shrug is a row of stuffed toys he has collected over the years; Sponge Bob, a rabbit, a frog, a donkey and a giraffe. 

 

The Donkey’s name is Sylvestre.

 

Pedro’s father was Sylvestre and he kept donkey’s on the family plot up out of town behind the pine trees. Today the family plot is part of the golf course built by a corrupt local authority thirty years ago.

 

Some nights Pedro walks up to the fourteenth and sits there drinking wine.

 

His doctor says he shouldn’t but Pedro knows that the wine won’t kill him.

 

Memories will.

 

He will die of a broken heart for all that is past.

 




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Mx

popps said...

i think we spin a few webs of our own too !! x