Animals And Origami

George

I miss the sea breeze mussing my hair and the feel of cold sand worming between my toes. Even now, in autumn, the shoreline has its charms, like the squeals of the oystercatchers and the rhythmic ebb and flow of the tide. My dreams are of swimming in the ocean, of eating freshly caught mackerels and of kissing girls among the dunes, but these are the fancies of a silly old fool.

I try to keep my chin up. The set routines and loneliness bore me. Sloppy cottage pie every Monday, and that’s not the worst of it. I miss holding hands with Veronica, but she’s not with us anymore. I was head over heels in love with her at one point. She had strawberry-blonde hair and eyes the color of thunderclouds. I miss getting ice cream or collecting shells with Tilly, who would grip my hand with her little one in earnest. Her laughter was as pleasant as the wind chimes tinkling outside the multicolored beach huts, but she’s dead too.

The edge of a sheet of paper slides across the pad of my index finger, stinging as it slices, and brings me crashing back to claustrophobic reality. I still have my hobbies, I suppose. In old age, hobbies keep my mind sharp and my fingers dexterous. I’ve been working on an origami Noah’s Ark for some time now. I even have a metal engineer’s rule to make the folds neater. Lions, tigers, bears, cranes, cows, orangutans—they’re all here. Like me, Noah did what he had to do to survive. Sometimes I dream I’m Noah standing at the bow of my great ship surrounded by sea, haunted by the stink of captive animals.

The librarian orders books on origami especially for me. He’s a nice guy, got more