“That came from the war.”
My finger, recently softened from Dawn and chipped dishes, ran over the white muzzle and down the mane, tracing the circular base.
“I was in North Africa,” he continued. “During an air raid, a few of us took shelter under a bridge. I looked down at my feet,” he said, taking the miniature steed in his hands, holding it up to the light, “and found this fellow peering up at me through several layers of dirt. Look.”
His pale, aged hands took the magnifying glass off of the coffee table and placed it in mine and held the little sculpture up so I could see it. I pulled the rectangular lens forward and backward until the view focused.
“Look in the creases of the mane,” he indicated. A thin thread of dirt ran deeply through the crevices. “North African soil! Fifty-seven years old, how about that. Ivory.” I gently galloped it along the edge of the table, carefully tapping the base to the wood. “I often wonder where the rest of the set was,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder if he misses his brethren. Almost felt bad taking him home without searching for more pieces. I like to picture homeless men playing a game of chess under that bridge right before the raid began.”
I laughed.
“Think you could draw me a picture of that sometime?” he asked, slapping his hand down on my shoulder. “A couple of hobos playing chess with this little chap under a bridge?”
I nodded, even though I hadn’t drawn in years. After sixth grade art class, I’d stowed my graphite and oils in the back of my underwear drawer wrapped up in a swimsuit top from summer. I’d told my mother that my teacher had mistaken them for the school’s property and kept them in the classroom when she asked me to make something nice to hang in the front hall for Thanksgiving. My mother knew that my grandfather appreciated my art—he had one of my pottery pieces, halfway collapsed from the slightly broken kiln, from third grade, and an acrylic portrait of my dog above his desk.
He reached for a nearby copy of The Smithsonian and tore out the subscription card, handing it to me with a pen. “Write this down, there were some important details.”
I took the pen and sat up straight (quite the challenge in a La-Z-Boy) and listened. He reached into his tweed blazer pocket, extracting a pack of cigarettes and taking one after offering the pack to me. I politely declined; sometime during his eighty-two years, he had missed the government memo about smoking age limits.
He shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, and lit up, reclining in his seat and puffing nostalgically. “It wasn’t too big of a bridge; short, old; made of the rocks from a river nearby. Probably so old those Africans dragged the stones up there themselves. You ever seen an old bridge be built, Melinda?” Before I could shake my head, he shook his and muttered, “Course you haven’t, you’re too young. You’ve just seen the cranes. Men used to build bridges with their bare hands. Take a cart down to the river, lift the rocks yourself and haul it back up the hill. Mix your own cement and build it up from the ground, simple as that. They looked a hell of a lot better than the new ones.” Taking a drag, he closed his eyes in intent concentration. “Had a name…” he wrinkled his brow and shook his head. “Don’t remember it. Flinney would but he’s dead. You can make up a name.”
I hopelessly denied this statement in the back of my head through a managed nod—I lacked fuses of creativity the way the dead stems in the garden out the window in front of me lacked fruit, but the old man didn’t know this. Telling him otherwise would be a vain effort; the comment would be dismissed and my assignment would remain.
“It was about seven in the morning when the raid began. Bomb shelters, they’re like labyrinths with a bunch of turns in it, bunch of folks in those…we knew a direct hit would take it out, simple as that. So we ran to the nearest shelter, and that was that bridge, about eighty yards away. Crawled back in there, in the far corners where it gets tight, curled up, slapped our hands over our ears and could still hear the raid through them.”
My older brother walked in at the end of the sentence, carrying a box of printer paper for the computer he was setting up in our grandfather’s study. Eyes fixed on the gentleman in his tweed suit, he stooped to sit on a footrest near us, set the box down on the floor and listened.
The storyteller didn’t give so much as a glance of recognition to Corey’s entrance. He continued to stare at the book bindings and video cassettes on the opposite wall, extracting old recordings and replaying them behind his glassy eyes, the screen turned away so we could only hear the sounds.
“We both survived. No major injuries. Raid lasted a few hours I suppose.” His eyes unglazed and he looked concentratingly at me. “Dirty, that bridge was dirty, I must say. It was hard to stand since it was just one big slope of packed mud and dust, you kept slipping everywhere. And the stones were covered in a few layers of grime on the inside; outside the bridge wasn’t as bad, being exposed to rain and wind and all, but I must say…think you could get that? Throw some dirt colors in there?”
I nodded and jotted down ‘browns and tans’ on the card to satisfy him; he nodded approvingly.
“Now let’s see…I see two hobos under that bridge…one is wearing a fedora about the color of your grandmother’s Tupperware in there and a fringed gray jacket. The other one’s got an old patchwork quilt draped over his knees and a raggedy blue sweater over his shoulders. They’re over to the side, the right, that is, bent over a cardboard chess set that’s lying on the ground. The pieces on the board are all from different sets, collected over time. The one with the hat is white, the other black. Hat-Man is holding the knight—” he indicated the small horse in his palm—“and the other has his chin rested on his knuckles, looking at the board. There’s people walking over the bridge, but don’t put too much emphasis on them, they’re just a bunch of people in trench coats carrying briefcases and the like.” He let the smoke swirl in front of him, carving patterns in the impure oxygen, and deposited the butt in the ashtray on the table. “You’ll need to use light well. It’s dark under bridges, especially that one, but you need a focal point; the knight. The light should come from the white pieces, reflected in the black castles and pawns.” From his inside coat pocket he took a peppermint, grasped both ends and let the cellophane unwind, slowly placing it in his mouth. “I’ve tried to draw it several times, but I’m not much of an artist anymore.”
Corey cleared his throat. “Opa? I got the Dell hooked up. You’ll just need to secure a username a password then login and confirm your Hotmail account and you’re good to go.”
“To hell. This whole thing was your grandmother’s idea, I don’t know the slightest about any of that, you fix it if you don’t mind, Corey.”

That night I sat in front of my easel and a thin canvas. I had unearthed the easel in pieces from the back of my closet and somewhat reassembled it, lashing intersecting wood planks together with hair ribbons where I had lost the screws, and found the canvas sandwiched between a bookcase and wall. Locking the door, I reached back in my underwear drawer and untied the ties of the black swimsuit, unwrapping it and extracting three tubes: red, yellow and blue. I opened the drawer to the right and took out a pair of Christmas socks, pulling them apart to find violet, green, black and white nestled in a candy-cane striped knee-high. Brushes were hidden on a tiny piece of wood inside the drawer, six of them made of fine animal hair, some kind of Australian mink my art teacher told me about. Paper plates were snatched from beneath the china in the kitchen, a red cup full of water set beside the easel on a stool.
Sitting on the floor slowly, I crossed my legs and laid the Smithsonian subscription card with scribbled notes on the floor between them, a plate in front of me. I read each line on the card twice, even though I already knew what it said. From the floor, I reached up to the stool for a tube and unscrewed the tiny cap. With both hands I held it out in front of me at eye level and from it slowly squeezed black oil paint in a perfect loop. It wasn’t crusty as I’d expected. I blended white and purple til I had three shades each of black, brown, gray and white, and then five of brown around the perimeter of the plate. Standing up, I drew the colors over bare canvas, layering and blending and smoothing and whirling the strands until before I knew it, I had created a bridge and before I could see them two hobos walked out from behind the rock columns and sat down and one pulled out a board and the other adjusted his cap and suddenly they were huddled in the cold hunched over a board in fiercely silent competition and unaware people walked above them swinging briefcases and canes and tightening the tie around their trench coats and the little knight watched it all from the hand of the man with the hat. I blinked and stood back. Dawn was peeking outside, and the Vivaldi CD has stopped playing without my acknowledgement.

The next morning I found myself in my grandfather’s study, standing on the cushion of an armchair and balancing by leaning my knees against the plushy back, driving a four-inch nail into the wall.
“Melinda, if you would just let me do it,” my grandfather moaned from the seat in front of his new computer, swiveled around to face me.
“Here,” Corey offered, reaching for the hammer. “Dad and I hung all those mirrors in Oma’s bedroom last summer.”
“No, no, no, let the girl handle it,” our grandfather waved away. “She’s got it, she won’t break a nail,” he chuckled good-naturedly.
I slowly lifted the picture over the hook and straightened it out a bit.
“A little to the left,” he called.
I adjusted it.
“Perfect.”
He stood up, lit a cigarette and pulled the blinds up. Early afternoon light spilled through and fell over the bookshelves, walls and framed my work.
“Absolutely flawless,” he murmured. “You handled the lighting brilliantly,” he said, smiling and patting me on the back. “Just how I said, the little boy’s lighting up the whole place but not directly…glowing the place, shall we say?…yes, I believe so.”

I walked back up the street in silence with Corey at my side. He was wearing his coral-colored painter’s pants, a genuine rarity that our mother gave him for Christmas last year. He absolutely refused to wear them anywhere except at home and to our grandparents’, even though I know he really liked them, even if he did call them the Cursed Coral Cargos. They really were a lovely shade of red. The hammer was slung through the loop on the leg and the box of nails in one of his many roomy pockets.
“I wish they made the pockets bigger in girl’s jeans,” I said, taking a stab at conversation.
“I wouldn’t know,” he muttered.
“Well, in the attempt to make pants as tight as possible and hug our thighs like tinted saran wrap or something they leave very little room for pockets, so if you slip as much as a dollar fifty in there there’s a huge bulge. Guy’s pockets are roomy.”
“Whatever you say,” he shrugged, turning into our driveway.

That night at home I did the laundry. Reaching into the side pocket of the coral cargo pants, I extracted a lonely white horse.

Corey looked surprised at breakfast the next morning when he saw an ivory knight in the windowsill. “How’d he get over here?”
I shrugged and prodded my eggs. “Didn’t you bring him?”
He scoffed. “You kidding? Opa would die if that thing was gone for ten minutes, I’m not about to mess with that.”
I raised my eyebrows but didn’t look up at him. “It was in your pocket.”
“It was?”
“The Cursed Coral Cargos.”
He looked truly bewildered. “Maybe it fell in. Those pockets are big, you said so yourself.”

At ten o’clock a.m. we walked back down the street, Corey in his football practice shorts, me in tight jeans with a bulging pocket, the outline of a horse visible through it.
Pushing open the door, we found my grandfather on the couch in a plaid bathrobe twirling his thumbs. “I believe our friend has abandoned me,” he said forlornly. “I think he became jealous of his oil counterpart and left for home.”
“No, he’s here,” I said, holding out my stashed treasure before him. I dropped it into his cupped hands.
“There you are!” he cried triumphantly. “Did you take him?” he asked, looking eagerly at us.
“Followed me home,” Corey shrugged.
“Oh. Well in that case, we need tea and a cigarette. Come into the breakfast room, I’ll get Oma up…”
“No need, I’ll throw something together if you’re hungry,” I said, already walking to the cabinet and taking out the Quaker Oats.
“Alright. You make them better anyway,” he chortled, setting the horse in the windowsill and following me into the kitchen.
As I rinsed out a pot and turned the stove on I heard the crackle of a lighter and the rustle of pages of back issues of The Smithsonian in the next room.
“April 1987—best issue, Corey,” my grandfather called. “Great stories, fantastic photos.”
“That’s when I was born,” I grinned.
“It is, isn’t? Well I’ll be.”
“Opa?” Corey called. “Did you take the horse?”
“Knight, Corey. If you ever learn to play chess, for God’s sake call it a knight, it’s proper terminology.”
“No, seriously, did you, is it in the kitchen?”
“Windowsill, Corey.”
“Did you open it?”
“No, it’s drafty in here as it is. Why?”
I stepped into the living room. Corey stood in front of a window cracked about three inches. Glimpsing, I saw a green fedora and a faded gray jacket slip disappearing down the street, grimy fingers closed tightly around a gleaming white beacon.