BRASS

It was those heavy brass fire bellows that she saw every time she closed her eyes. Ornate patterns engraved into both sides, the squeak of the leather as her grandfather put them to the glowing embers of the coal fire and squeezed.  She remembered how the red coal would glow to a bright orange as he did, his thick tobacco stained fingers clasping the handles of the bellows.

Then he’d stand up, dust off his grey slacks, (always grey slacks), and say “it’s no use love, we need another few pieces of coal on it”

This was her only memory of him. Her only clear one anyway. There were snippets of other things, a distant song with unclear words and a muddled melody, thick horn rimmed glasses and a tattooed forearm, sinewy with old hardened muscles. The ink of the tattoo long faded to a bluish colour, the ink, bleeding and running and mingling with his own veins, that arm looked like blue stilton cheese, she used to think.

Those were the only things she knew of him. That and a deep regret at not coming back before now. Now there were only those memories. There would be no more.

She cursed her mother for leaving with her all those years ago, as she sat in an unfamiliar sitting room, staring blankly at an unfamiliar grandmother, desperately trying to think of the appropriate responses that a granddaughter should give at a time like this.

As she sat there, in this awkward, thick, sad, silence, her grandmother began to sob, deep gulping sobs, while she looked at her, as if imploring her to do something, to act, to say something even, say anything, anything at all.

But words wouldn’t come. So she did the first thing that came to her, and got down on her knees, knelt beside the dying fire, took the old bellows in her hands, and began to squeeze.