“Don’t know much.”

The man has scooted up on next to me, tongue twirling a toothpick across rows of pearly whites.

“Excuse me?” I take a sip of my cider; bitter, too bitter today, just the way I need it to be.

“Don’t know much,” he says again, and this time I see how old he is. Ancient! Wrinkles rolling over into other wrinkles like the dunes of some far off and unknown land, eyes so far gone, it’d be stupid to call ‘em sinkholes. But there’s life in him, it crackles through his voice, reaches up through the depths of a battered and beaten down body, scrambling through the guts and the wizened lungs, to climb out of the mouth, gaping wide, sounding fresh and young and covered in muck. That voice, along with his perfect teeth, the only spotlights on a dim stage.

“Don’t know much… but I can tell it when I see it.” He sucks in air, hard, fast, then slow, as if he forgot how painful it was to breath.

“See what?” I look him square in the eyes, wherever they may be.

“Why love!” He beams like a mummy just unwrapped.

“That plain to see, huh?”

“Yes indeedy. That skittish rabbit look, ears up, ears up, nose a twitchin’!”

He looks at me and laughs, the breadth of ages past come tumbling out.

“Why yes sir, that one right there! Ooo wee! You’ve got it bad!”

“Don’t I know it.”

He leans in close and it is like winter has come home, chilling me to the bone.

“Glad to know it then, cause I’ve crossed paths with fellas who barely do, even if the girl is standing right outside ready to strip nekkid for them right then and there! Oh but love ain’t so much about the human body…  Oh it plays a part, but one can admire the female form any day of the week no love attached. Yes sir, you know what love is all about, yes you do. It’s about the soul.”

I take a sip of my cider. It burns.

“ Say,” the old man says, fingers strumming some invisible instrument. “Why not indulge an old feller’s curiosity and show us the young lass. She’s here in this town?”

“Yes.”

“Fine them, take me to her, let me greet her, shake her hand, congratulate the both of you on such a momentous occasion.”

He begins to blow at something unseen on his knee.

“It’s an ant. I hate em and they’re everywhere it seems.”

“Hmm.”

I finish off my cider and am about to ask the barkeep for another when the old man grabs my arm. My flesh stings under his touch, it’s as if someone has caught the tides of all the oceans in the world, locked them up in some horrible underground aquarium, then exposed them to the sun, turning them into nothing but sand and bone.

“Come on lad, let an old man witness the miracle of youth. Take me to her.”

“All right.”

I get up from the bar, shoving his arm aside, and we go to the door.

The night is tilting towards dawn now, warm pinks leeching onto the edges of haunted blues.

“Come with me then, if you’re so inclined to see my love.”

The old man smiles. “I am, I am,” he says.

We walk past street after street of sleeping houses, past the church freshly white washed, the new schoolhouse, out to the edge of town and to the graveyard.

“Oh,” the man says, and with that all the glamour and hope in him cascades away on the fleeting night wind.

“Here we are,” I say, and kneel at the tombstone in front of us.

The old man begins to weep, struggling to kneel himself. I take his hand firmly and help him down to the ground.

Through thick salty tears he says, “I should have seen it back there. A man of my age, I should have recognized death, being so close to the feller as I am. Ah there he is tapping me on the shoulder right now, reminding me that it’ll be soon. Very soon.”

He sniffles. I offer him my handkerchief, but he declines, saying, “let these old hands do the work, feel the truth of my days on their callused tips.”

I nod, searching for something to say, licking my lips, feeling mighty thirsty. I watch as the turning choral pink horizon kisses the last sliver of moon good night.

“It’ll be a fine day,” the old man finishes up. His face, now a dry canyon floor, was once, very recently, raging rapids carrying the debris of many lives along with it, and before that, further back, but probably not too long ago, resembled that of my own face, the green paths of hope and longing.

The old man turns towards me. The first glimmer of sunlight catches his eye, revealing the faint shape of a flowerbed still growing on the other side.