A Beheaded Cart (standard:romance, 1521 words)
Author: samvaknin	Added: Oct 10 2004	Views/Reads: 3110/2031	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
My grandfather had one love: my grandmother. A ravishing, proud, raven-haired woman.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story


My grandma withered, dilapidated by this onerous existence. Eveningtime,
she would get up and carry her stool afore, clenched in two twiggy 
hands, tediously dragging her reluctant self on the long march home. My 
grandfather observed her, his eyes a moist, eroding guilt. His 
disintegrating pushcart, the rain-drenched figure of his loved one, the 
whizzing torment of the desert winds, the sound of the crackling paper 
bags in her arthritic palms - they all conspired to deny him his 
erstwhile memory of her. 

Each morning, my grandfather woke up to study this ageless image as he
glided over her translucent skin, high-arching cheeks, and 
sleep-fluttery eyelashes. He fended off the intrusions of the world as 
he smoothed the covers and tucked her figure in. Then, he would get up 
and make her breakfast, arranging ceremoniously her medicines in 
multicolored plastic containers on the tray. 

But my grandma rejected his sunup pleas. She wouldn't go on living. One
silent morning, she clung to her sheets and wouldn't rise and accompany 
him. That day, gray and defeated, my grandpa ploughed the pavement with 
his barrow, unfolded a worn deck chair, and sank in, awaiting my 
grandmother's reappearance. 

When she did not materialize, he left his post much earlier than usual.
He emptied the compartments duteously, packed the unsold goods in large 
canvas sacks, tidying them away behind the two bottom doors of his 
cart. He then unfurled a polyester sheet above it and sailed home, 
shoving and cajoling his screeching and scraping workstation. 

My grandma was in bed, as he had left her, ensconced in blankets, a
suicidal tortoise, glaring at the ceiling as it bled in aqueous 
abstracts. My grandfather parked his rusting, faded, wagon and climbed 
home. His wife awoke with startled whimpers, tears streaming silently 
down her creviced face, tearing his heart with the iron grip of 
festering love. He hugged her and showered her with panicky little 
kisses. 

She froze and fortified her berth with pillows piled high, staring at
him through narrow cracks of oozing sanity. 

One day, my grandpa, returning in the evening, left his cart outside,
uncharacteristically. He entered and, for a few minutes, he and my 
grandmother just watched each other wearily. He extended a calloused 
hand and she dreamily stood up and escorted him to their porch, which 
overlooked the weed-grown garden. 

My grandfather draped her shoulders with a knitted woolen shawl. He
tightened it, and then, her shivering hand in his, he sat his love 
among some cushions he prepared. She glanced aimlessly at a guava tree 
that shot among the trail of graveled stones. My grandfather 
contemplated her awhile and then, with sudden resoluteness, left. 

Seconds later he reappeared among the shrubs, saluted her with a
sledgehammer he held tenuously with both hands. She strained her face, 
attentive, consuming his image, like a flower would the sun, or the 
blind do the sounds. 

Gasping and panting, my grandpa heaved the pushcart to the center of the
plot. With repeated, furious, blows, he dislocated its wheels and 
doors. Reduced to splintered wood and twisted metal, he cocooned it in 
the nylon throw and left it, devastated by the trees. 

Sitting beside, they watched the setting sun diffracted from the
green-hued sculpture in the garden. A smile budded in my grandma's 
honeyed eyes and spread into my grandfather's deep blue gaze. 

The cart stood there for years, disintegrating inexorably beneath its
blackening shield. Its wheels, now rooted in the soil, it sank into the 
mildewed ground, another, peculiarly shaped sapling. My grandpa never 
adjusted the synthetic sheet that swathed it, nor did he dig out the 
burgeoning wheels. 

My grandpa was visiting a pharmacy, replenishing her medications, when
my grandma died. With the dignity of the indigent, he never bargained, 
never raised his voice. Packed in small, white, paper bags, he rushed 
the doses to his wife, limping and winded. 

This time the house was shuttered doors and windows. My grandma wouldn't
respond to his increasingly desperate entreaties. He flung himself 
against the entrance and found her sprawled on the floor, her bloodied 
mouth ajar. As she fell, she must have hit her head against the corner 
of a table. She was baking my grandfather his favorite pastries. 

Her eyes were shut. My grandpa knew she died. He placed her remedies on
the floured and oiled table and changed into his best attire. Kneeling 
beside her, he gently wiped clean my grandma's hands and mouth and head 
and clothed her in her outdoors coat. 

His business done, he lay besides her and, hugging her frail remains, he
shut his eyes. 

My uncles and aunts found them, lying like that, embraced. 

My grandparents' tiny home was government property and was reclaimed.
The sanitary engineers, revolted, removed from the garden the 
worm-infested, rotting relic and the putrid sheet concealing it. 

The next day, it was hauled by sturdy garbage collectors into a truck
and, with assorted other junk, incinerated. 

Short Fiction in English and Hebrew 

http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/ 

http://www.suite101.com/files/topics/6514/files/shortfiction.rtf 


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