Saturday's Storyteller: "He just leaned against the wall like an old ironing board."
by Belinda Roddie He just leaned against the wall like an old ironing board, smoking a cigar that smelled remarkably like dried pecans and rain-soaked resin. He rubbed his hands together continuously, the smoke spiraling around the blurs of his fingers, brisk, chafing sounds issuing from his cracked palms and age-weathered skin. He did not look at me, nor anyone else in the room, instead choosing to stare straight out the window, the stogie drooping haphazardly from his swollen lower lip, the scraping of his hands painfully audible from where I sat. Outside, the fog was drifting endlessly forward, swathing the adjacent hillsides in an almost sticky mist that turned anything and everything white. The chill oozed its way through the cracks in the walls, and I found myself shivering. My brother, gray-lipped and narrow-eyed, folded his arms across his chest and continued to scowl at the man we were visiting. My mother, in contrast, kept her arms at her sides, her hands pulling at the h