Don’t Leave Me Behind

Art by Zahra Elhanbaly

Writing by Sarah Shin

He sat on his easy chair in the living room, light blue eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses staring out at the rain emptying into the backyard, soft veiny hands clutching the brown pleather armrests. His gray tracksuit matched the gray paint of the walls, dwarfing a skinny frame. White downy hair covered the interesting landscape of his skull—all of the bumps and dents behind his ears and at the nape of his neck.

This was his sanctuary that housed his fragile-boned body for long periods of time during his visits. He would sit for hours, the wrinkles of his skin reflecting the wrinkles of his leather chair until the memory of him became embedded into the room itself, echoing throughout the walls. The skylight showered beams of water-logged light onto the hardwood floor, just as his liquid eyes shone from his face; the fireplace held a little burning entity, just as flames traveled beneath his skin, resulting in the constant motion of his fingertips; the piano stood upright in the corner, just as his spine aligned with the back of his chair.

I sat next to him on the armrest of his pleather chair, holding questions in my pockets and on the tip of my tongue. “Halabuji,” I asked my grandfather in Korean. “Why are your eyes blue?”

He peered at me, skylights behind spectacles. “I don’t know. Maybe from my treatments.”

“Maybe it’s because they got tired of being brown,” I said, reaching to hold my grandfather’s soft, soft hand.

Grunt.

“Halabuji, why are your hands so soft?”

His fingers fidgeted inside of my palms as sparks rose from the flames under the mantel. “From my medicine.” Cough. “Na-Eun?”

“Yes?"

“Are you going to practice your piano?”

I glanced up from studying his blue hand veins to sigh in the direction of the stiff black instrumen in the corner. “What should I play first?”

A rusty chuckle, then: “Hmm, Czerny?”

I always played that Czerny first, fingers moving in repetitive patterns across the keys in monotonous rhythms and exercises. The notes seemed to elevate my grandfather into another dimension beyond the limitations of his frail body, spine straighter than ever as the strains of music
climbed the walls. The speed of the sound of the raindrops falling increased as they chased the noises of my hands across the black and white. The fire in the fireplace flashed in reds and yellows and oranges, whirling into kaleidoscopes of colors that reached past infinity, mesmerizing me as they energized him. His fingers would contract in reaction, clenching and unclenching to follow the underlying beats of the music.

My gaze tunneled to focus on those hands until I could imagine the wrinkled skin smoothed out in youthfulness, grabbing onto the roofs of trains in North Korea, gripping onto pickaxes in German mines, shaving down the sharp edges of glass in his refinery shop, holding my grandmother’s gentle fingers, smoothing the baby-down hairs on my mother’s head, and flicking bleak black ashes from stubby cigarettes.

After I finished practicing, I wiped the keys with the red cloth and closed the lid of the piano. The thud jolted my grandfather from his reverie, and his head lifted as I walked closer, blue eyes maybe a little glassy behind his spectacles. My routine kiss on his cheek produced a pleased huff of breath
on his mouth and a resounding bout of coughing deep from his lungs, resonating from somewhere inside of his chest.

The chair creaked.

“Do you want some water, Halabuji?” I asked, straightening.

“Yes.”

On my way out of the living room, at the threshold of the double doors, I looked backwards and saw him gazing out into the wet outdoors.

His hand was trembling as he touched a white handkerchief to his mouth, then let it slide downwards to press against his chest.

A thread of smoke rose from the burning logs in the fireplace.

And I ran from the living room to find a glass of water, leaving him behind sitting in his brown pleather easy chair, watching the rain fall without any music.