Goodbye Grandma, hello tiny being

by Enigmatic Paul

I hated having to do it, but she was dead, and my little brother Steve sure as hell wasn’t going to and I didn’t think Mum would cope with it right now, so off I went to clean out Grandma’s house. She’d always been a hoarder, wall to wall crap, but every piece of junk had a story to tell, and it felt so strange sifting through it all without her there to tell them. I sat on the floor, cradling the photo of Grandad with his dumb old Walrus moustache, remembering the last time I’d seen them together. It had been Lou’s christening – such a lovely day despite the rain. In fact maybe the rain had made it; rather than scattering in little pods of usual suspects around Uncle Phil’s garden, we’d been confined together in the marquee, and ended up telling and hearing tales of childhood, lost relatives, relatives we’d wished were lost, until Lou started bawling and the party had slowly dispersed. It was the first time I’d really felt that Steve and I were proper grown-ups. I guess the new generation of which Lou was the first would do that. Anyway, I’d kissed them both goodbye, along with the rest of the gang, never imagining that the next time I’d see Grandma would be at Grandad’s funeral. Top down, maybe that was the best plan of attack. I hooked the stick onto the hatch, and watched the folding staircase descend. It had always fascinated me as a child, how it swung down and stacked together, leading up to the attic room. This room had always been her hideaway, though her arthritic knees had stopped her going up there the last 5 or 6 years. It was where she’d worked on her various projects; sewing, origami, painting, and the scatter of tiny threads and scraps of paper under the layer of dust carpeting the floor were a colourful and multi-textured illustration of years of fiddling. The attic, like the rest of the house, was overflowing with stuff, but here, at least, it mostly seemed to have a purpose. Boxes of paper here, wool there, fabric offcuts under the desk. Then I saw them, the little set of mysterious footprints from the window to the desk and back again, and eight tiny fingerprints hooked over the edge of the desk, as if someone very small had been clinging on to peer over to watch her work. But the footprints looked fresh...I walked over to the window, and found it to be unlocked. Curiouser and curiouser, I thought, temporarily distracted from my grief by the mounting mystery. I swung the window open, and looked out. Left, right, up, down, then left again. As I swung my head right once more a movement in the tree caught my eye, and I saw, to my shock, a tiny being, of adult proportions but baby sized, climbing, ape like, in its branches, and disappearing into a large hole in the trunk.

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