Ancient Days 1

Composted by Thaatch Kananatu

An old man was left in the lurches last week, near a desolate filthy river. There are no longer trees or bushes. Only heaps of garbage and hills of rubbish. Rivers are polluted with waste from factories, from condominium developments and the common litterbug. In such a river, that once flowed like an ancient blue sky, floated sardine cans of maggots, plastic wrappers with faded words, dead fish and rotten plant-life. Here he stood, the old man with a stick.

How he got here is a mystery to him. He stood there, staring into the eye of a dead frog on a slimy rock. His eyes squinting, fitted uneasily in deep sockets enveloped by creases of brown tanned skin spotted with poking white hair. He laments.

“A feeling of morose has crept back into my mind. Thoughts swirl this time and it wears me down. I am disinterested in speaking or listening. I wish to brood in isolation until the morose nature passes.”

A black crow perched itself on a failing trunk of a dead tree. The crow's eye zoomed in on him, like a weapon locating its mark. Directly under it sat an old woman like a heap of old discarded clothes. In fact, the municipality often mistook her for just that: the odd garbage man with a distinct mark on his face would spit out his anguish at the mistake of trying to clear her out of there. They discovered her because of a strange murmur-like monologue. As if the clothes spoke of its former life.

“My existence reminds me of years ago when I showed passive aggressive behaviour. Some natural due to tiredness, some on purpose.”

She was a slob like creature embedded to the ground, speaking of her glorious past. It would infuriate a "normal" human being, but it had no effect on the old man. Her mannerisms were small, but so is a sharp pin in your rear end. The world could come crumbling down but she would sit still and say, “Its crumbling.” Even if provoked, her own passivity would only charge out like a sarcastic mule. What avail?

She reminded him of something he read once in a tattered page. A book by that Conrad fellow, A Smile of something? “I was seduced by the moody expression of her face, by her obstinate silences, her rare, scornful words; by the perpetual pout of her closed lips, the black depths of her fixed gaze turned slowly upon me as if in contemptuous provocation.”

So, the old man ignored her. Ignored her presence and acted as if she was in fact a pile of old clothes. He told himself, “I am myself – mostly. Morose but happy to be.”