The Short Stories

The old man dragged the rickety wooden chair to the curb and placed it beside the trash cans. In many ways the two were similar and, not unlike him, the chair had seen better days. Two of the spindles were broken and the seat was cracked along the grain from front to back. Its once pristine finish was now worn down to bare wood. At eighty-five years of age, the man realized that nothing lasted forever, and the chair was no exception. He took one last look at it before shuffling back up the driveway to the rear door of his home. Although the house had a grand front door with a sidewalk extending to the street, it was seldom used. Traffic on the road had gotten much worse in recent years, and visitors rarely parked on the street anymore. 

     He had lived alone in the two-story home since his wife passed away several years earlier, and it was time to clear out some of the unnecessary clutter. It would be less for the children to do when he was gone, he thought, and as time passed he found he needed fewer material possessions to be happy. Now he was content to sit quietly and page through the old photo albums, letting the memories flow over him.

     He stood in the living room gazing out the large bay window towards the street. The chair sat with the other items he had discarded earlier that morning and, as he looked at it, he recalled a day almost sixty-five years earlier when he stood on the chair fixing the overhead light in the kitchen. He was single at the time and had just purchased the house. It needed quite a bit of work, but he knew it would be a fine place to raise a family if he ever found that special someone to be his wife. As he stretched to run a new wire through the light fixture, he had leaned too far and the chair tipped over beneath him dropping him onto the tile floor below. Although the fall had broken his wrist, the man considered it to be one of the luckiest moments of his life. It was at the hospital that he met the beautiful young nurse he would eventually marry.

     Several years later, the chair found its home in the upstairs bedroom they had turned into a nursery. The man and his wife tried for months and months to conceive with no success, but that winter she announced that they were expecting. His son, John Robert, was born the following October. The baby was not a particularly sound sleeper, and they would trade off sitting in the chair by the crib holding him. On most nights it was the only way they could get him to sleep. The chair remained in the nursery through the birth of all three of their children: two boys and a girl.

     When John grew up and moved into his first apartment, money had been tight. He filled it with whatever pieces of furniture he could gather, and the chair became part of a mismatched set surrounding his dining room table. When the family visited him, they would spend long evenings around the table eating and playing card games. The chair served John well, and when he eventually married and received a new dining set as a wedding gift, it returned to the family home. By that point it was beginning to show its age and was relegated to the attic for many years. It would occasionally be used by the man’s other children as they needed it, but always ended up back in the attic.

     Two weeks shy of their sixtieth wedding anniversary, the man and his wife were informed by their doctor that she had been stricken with cancer. She was a strong woman and faced it bravely for almost a year before becoming bedridden. On the day the hospital bed was wheeled into the living room on the first floor of their home, the man climbed the attic stairs to retrieve the chair. He placed it by her bed, and it was there that he sat for hours on end reading to her. At times, he would simply sit in the chair and hold her hand as she slept. Eight weeks later, she drifted off peacefully with her husband by her side.

     All these things had been running through the old man’s head as he stood looking out the window. As his thoughts shifted back to the present, he began to feel that maybe it wasn’t quite time for the chair to go. He could fix it. He would repair the spindles and the seat and give it a fresh coat of varnish. Like him, it still had something to offer the world.

     With a sudden sense of urgency, he slipped on his coat and slowly made his way to the back door. As he stepped outside onto the walk, he could hear the trash truck lumbering down the street. He had lost some of his agility in recent years but moved steadily along the walk to the side of the house. He rounded the corner and stopped. The chair was gone.

     Back in the house, he lowered himself onto the couch. How could he have let something so important be taken away...something that had been such an integral part of his existence for so many years? He picked up a photo album from the end table and leafed through the pages. As he did, he noticed something he hadn’t before. There, in the yellowed photographs, the chair appeared in picture after picture. It was in the photograph of his lovely young wife, holding their baby in her arms as she sat by his crib. It was in the picture from the Thanksgiving dinner they had spent years ago at John’s apartment. The old man smiled as he remembered their son had overcooked his first turkey and they ended up ordering takeout. It also appeared in the last picture their daughter had taken of him and his wife together, sitting in the living room as she mustered a weak smile for the camera.

     It was then he realized that, although everything eventually comes to its natural conclusion, the loss of those things is never really the end. The most important of them remain in our consciousness like photos in an album, to be recalled at the times they’re needed the most.

     Several months later, the old man was gone as well.

Copyright © 2023 by James V. Boyer

Cover photo by Yunus Tuğ of Pexels

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