He's Coming!

“He’s coming,” I said into the phone, “I have to go.”

I rushed to the intercom, it rang again before I got there. I pressed the button. “Who is it?"

"It’s me, mom.”

When he was inside the apartment, after he had put down his bag and his laptop case and his designs, we had hot coffee with pepper in the kitchen and talked.

”So we are moving the office downtown, to Lambert Avenue,” he said, and I remembered the times when I was there myself, many times, but always as a passer by, never had any business, never could afford to shop. I remembered a woman in a very nice winter coat and, as she passed me by, I felt like a dirty beggar. “The new project is a vacuum-based transportation system that can take you to New York in two hours. Can you believe that, ma?” he said, and I believed it, even though it was hard for me to imagine.

”Things are getting bigger and better all the time,” I said, because I knew he would like it. He smiled and kissed my cheek, and then he talked about trends and technologies, and working in an open floor plan, and the best hours for creativity. I looked down on my hands and they were all wrinkled and covered in scars, so I hid them away in my sweater sleeves. I knew that on Sunday night, after he would leave, the sweater would try to keep me warm, but it would not be able to.

I would call Rebecca again, tell her about his visit and about all the things he told me. I would not remember some of them because I could not understand them.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk