These Are the Names

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Pontus Beg had not become the old man he’d imagined. Something was missing — a great deal, in fact. As a boy, he had for a time been in the habit of walking around his father’s yard with a pair of safety glasses on the bridge of his nose, his hands clasped behind his back — that was how he imagined the life of an old man to be. Sometimes he used a branch for a walking stick. More than anything else, he had wanted to be old. Slow and deliberate, a captain calmly braving the storm. To die a wise man.

When the glasses started leaving welts on both sides of his nose, he put them back beside the grinder in the shed and began waiting patiently for old age to come, instead of running out to meet it.

He had only started feeling like an old man after he developed a cold foot. He was fifty-three, still too young to really be considered old, but he could see the writing on the wall. A nerve had become pinched in his lower back. Ever since, then, his left foot had gone cold. Standing on the bathroom floor in the morning, he could see that his feet were different colours. The right one was ruddy — the way it should be — but the left one was pale and cold. When he pressed his fingers against it, he felt almost nothing. It was as though the foot belonged to someone else. The dying starts from the feet up, Beg thought.

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