2868. The old man © Bruce Goodman 8 October 2023

I was walking down the road minding my own business, when a man with a walking stick appeared. He was really old. He carried a little bag that closed when the threaded string was pulled. The bag was a faded red. The old man handed me the bag and said “Don’t open this until you get home.” Oh! For goodness sake! This was starting to sound like Jack and the Beanstalk. I hoped it wasn’t beans in the bag that I had to throw out the window! It was! Twenty to thirty beans – they looked like dried kidney beans – now sat on my kitchen bench. I wasn’t going to angrily throw them out the window like Jack’s mother. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if I was meant to plant them. Was I meant to throw them in a soup? I had secretly hoped it was money in the bag. The beans stayed on the kitchen bench for a couple of days and then I put them back into the faded red bag. I put the red bag into a plastic lidded container where I keep all the seeds that I have collected, sorted into envelops. They await the spring! And that’s where the beans are now. I subsequently heard that the old man was found dead on the side of the road. He had been beaten to death in some bizarre mugging. Police don’t know if the man was robbed or not. The little red purse he usually carried was not on him. Contact Author Back to Index Next Story Previous Story