The 1993 Penny

Since  that awful morning when she fell onto the concrete, one unyielding metal cane between her legs in such a fashion that it was tantamount to a severe caning on both of her brittle legs... she never had recovered her mobility and her disability before that day now appeared a laughable exaggeration compared to the hell she now inhabited.

No longer able to move freely from room to room nor even to use her own bath because of its high walls, her bathroom had become a place where she cleaned the items she brought with great difficulty from the old house.  During the period when Winston still helped her, she sometimes was able to get a lift home from him, unbeknownst to George who was almost pathological about his unwillingness to have any of her possessions in HIS house.  This was the period when she brought sundry unrelated items in carrier bags and often the first stop was her bathroom, where she investigated each for the ubiquitous moths that had destroyed so much of her life.

When George later claimed that Winston had stolen a jar of pennies from him, she was puzzled by the alleged act, as Winston had had ample opportunities to steal items far more valuable from her and never had done so, somewhat to her surprise.  She finally realised it simply was another way to weaken her, deprive her of any source of aid so that George could continue to complain that the old house was filled with her stuff without giving her any way out of the mess.

Meanwhile, she had at least a year's worth of work in carrier bags, rock crystal rosariies jumbled together with children's books, antique doll shoes (more often or not an odd shoe rather than a pair), various silk ribbons and bits of cloth as well as the occasional valuable silver coin.

It was then that she began to sit on the toilet, with the lid down, in order to sort through these items and clean or polish the metal.  Much had been damaged by water leaks at the old house.  The 1993 British penny, when she found it, was almost black.  It definitely was a victim of water damage and damp and so she decided to polish it having the means for doing so at hand after rehabilitating a German automatic knife.

While she was engaged in the simple act of polishing the little penny, it leapt suddenly from her hands.  Had it been any other coin, even a silver coin, it would not have mattered so much to her, but 1993 was possibly the most significant year of her life as it was the year when her daughter was born. She therefore tended to collect every item she could find from that year and obviously, it was the reason she had that particular penny.

When these little contretemps occurred, and for some reason they did so more frequently than ever now that she was ill-equipped to recover any item that fell to the floor, she usually would try to pick up the object immediately if possible.  The problem here was that the penny had disappeared completely from the face of the earth.

She searched every corner of the floor, behind the toilet as well as the area beneath the cabinets.  She even searched the tub, although she had thought the penny had gone in the opposite direction.  She moved all the bits of furniture that inhabited the room, mute testament to her struggle to keep the tub usable... a revolving stool, a moveable step and so on, all proven useless in the end.

The penny had been swallowed by the aether, apparently.  She could not find it, in search after search through the months.

Now, sweeping the floor of the bathroom again, she realised that finding the penny would be far more significant an event than it would have been originally.  It might even have some prophetic meaning attached to it, harbinger of her own death perhaps.  Not yet quite.  She still hoped to find it but she could foresee a day when she almost would come to DREAD the discovery, when its long absence would become a symbol of something dire, the end of an era, a slamming of a door.