Your Sunday Sip #6

My grandfather lived in black and white. The only way he could make sense of the world was through numbers. There wasn’t a time when he sat on his cream ribbed couch without his rectangular notepad, covered in hieroglyphics he wrote with one of those miniature pencils you take from a lottery kiosk, laying on the armrest. His white manila folder was an extension of his body that stuck out against his sky-blue collared shirt as he strode through the front door of my house and straight to my father’s bedroom every afternoon. “Did you do your homework today?” I would ask him in my own blue collared shirt and khaki skirt. As a little girl, I imagined Pandora’s Box opening before them behind those closed doors, the only explanation for their alternating curses and laughter.

I knew him with hair as bright and smooth as a white orchid, but in his previous life, there was no telling where the midnight sky ended and where his hair began. Dominoes were his music, his love, his mistress. His life was a game of priceless ivory that clacked together under his swirling palms, a uniform line of seven tiles, a rhythmic tap of his wedding band against the pieces he concealed. That same ivory that made up his beloved game made up his bones, for he was a man who lifted me in the air when I was 12 and he was 81. He was stronger than an old Toyota and at 22 years old, I might finally believe that it truly was his daily breakfast of banana and raisin bran that kept him running laps around the lake like a racehorse until his dying day.

In my house, there is an onyx telephone. Since 2023, it has sat on a shelf in my bedroom, sturdy and shiny, with a roulette wheel that spins if I stare at it long enough. But it never rings.