Flickr Fiction Friday: Focus

There is something unbearably melancholic about his umbrella.

He is holding it, clutching it, really, his hand worrying the cheap synthetic fabric as he anxiously scans the gallery for signs of familiar faces. It is the umbrella that Aunt Carol always told him to take, the umbrella he complained of so bitterly, and snarled that she thought he was a child.

He holds the umbrella like a club.

We told him we would meet him here, but now we are not sure. My cousin Prentiss pinches the skin above my elbow with sharp nails.

“He looks too sad.”

“No. He doesn’t look sad enough.”

We are twelve and thirteen, and bitter as gall; cold as black ice.

We have seen sin, and we are impatient with it. We are young and bold, and the world moves in swirls of black and white, there is right, and wrong, and nothing else. Have we not been told? Do and do, rule on rule, obey. Behave. Today we sit in judgment. But the lives of our elders are unknowable. They are nothing more than piles of aging flesh, sliding off into wrinkles, sloughing cells, somehow still animated. How, then, could our Grandpa Lanny – once we thought of his as ‘ours,’ before we repudiated him – still be thought of as attractive to someone? How could he have an affair on our Grandma Carol, take up with a widow with red-stained hair and yellowing teeth when both of them are almost seventy?

What conceit does seventy have left?

His leaving has taken its toll. There have been days of silence, of whispered conversations behind the kitchen door, Grandma Carol’s flattened, white threaded black hair, frowzy and dry against her pale powdered face, my mother’s haunted eyes, Uncle Loren’s insistence on investigators, lawyers, wills, and over it all, Grandma Carol’s soft voice pleading, leave it alone, children. Leave it. He won’t come back like this.

His mouth turns downward, matching the pleat in his forehead. Grandpa Lanny looks nothing like his usually debonair self. He has lost weight, his pants puddle sadly around his rubber rain shoes. He has no hat, no scarf, no gloves. He looks like a man who has, ill-prepared, run away from home.

“Crap. Crap. He sees us.”

Prentiss lets out a little moan.

I was not finished looking at him, tallying the differences in him. My legs twitch, muscles poised between love and rejection, the lightening expression of his hangdog face, and resentment. My feet are rooted. I want to run.

“There you are, my little gillyflowers! Come, come see the show. Helaine’s work is here – you will love it. She is a brilliant, brilliant photographer. You girls – maybe your Grandpa will buy you a camera for your birthday, hein? What do you think of that?” Grandpa Lanny tucks the umbrella beneath his arm, and waves us forward. “Come on, come on. We don’t want to miss anything, do we?”

Prentiss’ nails bite my arm again.

I am already shaking my head. No.

No. This has been a mistake.

We wanted to draw him, to bring him in. A glimpse of his precious granddaughters (it would have been grandchildren, but Heath was playing with the dog and Gavin would not come), wearing lacy collars and t-strap patent shoes, looking innocent and pure as he loved to see us. We wanted him to long for us, for family, and then for the comforts he had left behind; Grandma Carol’s pillowy bosom, his leather recliner and Havana humidor, the Tiffany lampshade we bought him last Christmas, the pearly Art Deco wallpaper in the front room. We wanted him to long for home, but it seems he had not been gone long enough.

Instead of us drawing him, he thinks to entice us.

A camera. A camera! Hah! Gavin’s mobile phone has a camera.

Our little world has been splintered and out of focus for too long.

It may never come into focus again.

“Girls! Wait! The show… come and have a little tea, then? Grandpa will treat you to chocolate malts… At least tell me how your Grandmother is…

I risk a glance behind me, hearing the magic word. His expression is woebegone, his rheumy old eyes wet, the umbrella once again wrapped in his gnarled fingers. My eyes sting, as I resist the urge to fling myself at him, wailing.

“Come home,” I whisper, as Prentiss yanks my arm and pulls me away. She does not yet forgive.

The watery sun spills through the smoked glass windows like a spotlight as he recedes from my sight.

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The picture (entitled O) that inspired this week’s Flickr snippet was taken by Flickr photographer Eyeblink, and will likely be Flicktionated by the usual suspects: The Gurrier, Ms. Teaandcakes, Elimare, Chris, Aquafortis, Valshamerlyn, and Miss Mari.