“The girl?” Hugh bobbled the spade and chucked it into his bag after getting a firm hold of it. “Why in the world would the girl be waiting for me? For this silly old spade?”
“See you soon, Mr. Mechta.” Timmy said in a manner of fact way, brushing off Hugh's question. “It is always a pleasure chatting with you.”
Hugh was about to protest and push for more information, but Timmy had already taken his leave – into the oncoming people leaving the metro. Hugh turned and watched as each person staring down at their phones, chatting with their friends, or just looking up at the buildings, sidestepped Timmy without even registering his presence. It was as if some unseen force enveloped Timmy and gently guided the crowd around and away from his path to exit doors.
The range of this force apparently had a limit because as quickly as the sea of people parted for Timmy, it formed back together and came crashing down on Hugh. They pushed and knocked into him while throwing dirty looks and mumbling even dirtier words. It was as if each person coming out of the metro had the sole goal of entertaining themselves by bumping into Hugh and making unsavory comments about his mother.
Hugh managed to turn himself around and join the forward momentum of the crowd. Even as he walked alongside them, some were still keen on persisting with their passive aggressive shoulder shoves.
Not to be left out of this game of human bumper carts, Hugh retaliated in kind and grinned believing that Masha was getting a laugh out of this.
Like many times before, Hugh entered the fortress.
Passing through the archway, Hugh observed the playground. Many more children than usual were playing, and their parents lined the parameter of the playground, keeping one eye on their children and another laser focused on their smartphones in hand. He saw a wide range of ages. Some were infants, others were just pushing four, a handful were preteens, and even a group of teenagers were hanging out on a bench. In this painting of different generations inhabiting shared space, the black-haired girl was not among them.
He considered it odd that she wasn't there, laughing and running with other children around through the sandbox, past the swings, down the slides, and up and along the miniature rope course.
Why wasn't she there playing made up games with the others and taking brief imperceptible pauses to steal glances at her parents to catch the admiration and love in their eyes?
Hugh walked on, trying to recall a memory of himself on a playground, riding the seesaw, and shooting down a slide. All he managed to retrieve from the database of his long-term memory was being too overweight to swing himself from rung to rung on the monkey bars, and the accompanying envy that he had felt when seeing other children who could do it with ease. The other children also had their parents around to encourage them when they slipped off the bars, but all Hugh had were the jeers of his peers and the blank stares from their parents.
Masha had advised him to let go of the past and Hugh knew that he needed to head her words. Pushing away those monkey bar memories before they could infect him with self-pity, the flowerbed came into view.
Just as Timmy had foretold, the black-haired girl was there and was engrossed in the business of digging holes.
Turning onto the path that led to the flowerbed, Hugh saw that she was no longer clawing the soil with her nails, nor poking with a stick. She had elevated her digging to a more sophisticated plane of manual labor. The black-haired girl had entered the age of metal, having replaced her wooden stick with a long and wide metallic spoon.
Hugh came to the bricks lining the flowerbed, but she didn't stop to greet him. She was too absorbed in digging with her advanced form of technology.
“Hey, how's the digging going?” Hugh asked.
The black-haired girl drove her spoon into the soil, like a conqueror claiming new land, and left it there. She regarded Hugh with bared teeth, flared nostrils, and furrowed brows that narrowed her eyes into violent slits. With her short black hair framing her face, she gave the appearance of an otherworldly demon ready to strike.
“Where in the heck did you go the other day!? I was waiting here, and you never returned!” She was all hellfire, and it was evident from how she roared that this inferno had been burning for some time. “Some elderly couple even offered a drinking straw to help me dig. A drinking straw! How could anyone believe they could dig with a drinking straw? Still, they offered up something quicker and more tangible than you, without even making the promise to do so!” The black-haired girl's pale cheeks flushed red with anger and Hugh anticipated that she would peg him between the eyes with her spoon.
Hugh said nothing, ashamed that he had disappointed the girl.
He wanted to muster up an excuse for his tardiness, but he couldn't bear to tell her that it was due to a pair of talking dogs. Unable to articulate himself, he did what he thought to be the next best thing.
He unslung his backpack, shifted it onto his chest, and plunged his hand deep inside. He rummaged around the bag, fingers risking nicks and papercuts from all his work documents but was unable to locate the spade.
Hugh panicked and doubted whether Timmy had given the spade back to him.
The girl rested her hands on her lap and observed Hugh as he dove his arm shoulder deep into the bag. The raging red in her cheeks gave way to their usual pale, and her pinched lips suppressing a smile told Hugh that she was getting amusement out of him looking like an incompetent magician failing to pull an uncooperative rabbit out of a hat.
Frustration and worry were overcoming Hugh, fearing that he had been too ignorant to put the spade back in the bag when he had been speaking to Timmy, so he evoked the final solution for when one faces a lost phone, key or knickknack in a bag.
He flipped the bag over and dumped all its contents to the ground.
Work papers and files, pencils, crumpled up café checks, unused plastic utensils, a pin depicting a smiling spaniel in front of a sunset that Hugh didn’t even know he owned, charging wires and other loose items that he had forgotten even existed, came tumbling out of the bag in a freefall mess.
But, the spade was not among the mess.
Desperate to hear metal bouncing and scraping against concrete, Hugh shook the bag like a house cleaner waving and whipping a dirty and shoe trodden rug over the balcony. Just as Hugh thought his hands were going to dislocate from his wrists, he heard what he had longed for and then some.
“Wow…” The black-haired girl whispered after the spade skidded and skipped across the cement into arm’s reach.
Kicking up soil, she scrambled over to the spade, snatched it up and held it to the sun.
In the same manner that Timmy had, she held it by the handle and slowly rotated it. She examined the edges and how the sunrays reflected off the faded metal.
“This is exquisite.” She said, copying not only Timmy’s words from not too long ago, but also his pronunciation and intonation.
“It was my grandmother’s.” Hugh said and kept to himself how Timmy’s and the girl’s admiration for the spade baffled him. To Hugh, it was just an old spade that his grandmother had used. “Seeing that you enjoy working in the flowerbed, and are in need of the correct tool for the job, I think she would be happy for you to have it.”
The black-haired girl’s eyes grew wider than sunflowers.
“I can really have her spade?” The girl asked full of disbelief.
“Of course, you can have it.” Hugh said and scratched his head, still confused by the awe with which the girl was showing to the spade. “I don’t think I’ve touched it once in my life until this week. You’ll make better use out of it than I.”
