DANIEL Medvedov

RUSTY NAIL
Short Story

Madrid 2013

Dedicated to Chin Fung Lew

I usually smoke cigars Jose L. Piedra (Stone), hunters type, oh, such a rustic flavor cigars with dense cedar smell. At a corner in my street Marqus de Zafra there is a small and cute tobacco shop where I buy my so called tobacco snuff box from time to time. In those summer days was I, by a happy chance, smoking one of it, when suddenly I observed a sort of dark stick inside of my pure tobacco
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cigar and I thought suddenly that a leaf petiole was left purposely there, carefully rolled and inverted. It was super hot to touch and I suddenly realized it was a nail. The black color was a kind of a patina and the sense of finding a nail in my cigar still has intriguing me. What is that? Does it have any sense which, for now being, escapes me? Yoga Samyama technique I used to know, shows me for many days and nights with my practice of turned concentration towards the nail pure tobacco inhabitant: this contemplation technique is something like focusing your light towards a subject whose secret you want to know and learn. Suddenly, in that nebulous question there was light: it was a kind
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of a farewell. That cigar was the last made by one of the factory workers. It was his gracious way of saying goodbye, to put a funny point of humor in its work now ending after more than sixty years of doing hand made cigars. Sometime later Ive learned that the old man was called Rusty Nail.

*
Every Sunday, Rusty Nail came out with his "rounciful hat", as the authors hat of Edward Lear, the creator of nonsense, looking at certain objects found on the street, kind of amulets like nuts and bolts, rusty nails, lost safety pins, and many other objects which
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never attracted the attention of people walking. He left down, on that city floor, as a gift to the world, a penny, just to offer something in return. He found some lost little umbrella bag or glove and got there inside everything he was seeing that day. Years later, when he was opening the same bag, fondly recalled a strange sensation of a cautious optimism, remembered the precise time, the right instance and the circumstances in which he had put all those objects with no value for anyone of the people of the city, but of a great importance to the initiates esoteric fellows. He went around with his hat in the vicinity of upscale restaurants and, at times, was knocked by the presence on the city floor down, of a whole and cvasi entire cigar, probably left or thrown by
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someone who could not stand to the honor of its power. Rusty Nail had invented a device to smoke out and not to burn his fingers. His little girl called him on the phone and asked to meet him down the street, just near to the Catholic Nouns School where she was a student: there she was sitting on a bench facing the sun. Those moments are pretty, precious stones of time. . . . They both had been involved for a while in deep conversation about dwarves and some ontic causes that generated her birth in the human world. There were secret things, so to say. . . Things that no one knew and which are not written anywhere at all. To whom may by chance and perhaps ask the kids all those things? To Rusty Nail. . .
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Today he found on the city floor a colored bead. . . Rusty Nail had green eyes. - Why I have not come with green eyes? - Asked the girl. - Things of God. . . - Rusty Nail said. - If you want your eyes green, you must love the night like me, the green leaves and birdsong. . . Very next day, the girl had green eyes. . .