He picked up the bag and held it closer to the light now. He was about to toss it aside when something about it caught his attention. He felt as if it had… called him. The boy examined it closer now. It was like those stories he read in books, where the main character found something with magical powers… except that this was not a story. He was sitting in the middle of a perfectly normal rug in the middle of a regular apartment in Brooklyn, yet somehow this bag felt special. He traced his index finger over the intricate patterns stitched into the sides of the bag, and realized they were telling him a story. The designs told of beasts that the makers of the bag had feared, strange lands they had visited, gods they had worshipped, and animals they had hunted. The boy wondered who had made the bag, and when.
It was not a very practical bag; it lacked the handles that modern bags have, and it looked as if it had once been carried by prosperous individuals. although they had been woven, its sides had the fine texture of bird feathers, ruffled before a storm. holding the bag up in front of him. He saw that parts of the bag were woven from thin wool strings, with shades of reds, greens, yellows, and purples, that had once been bright.
Other sections of the bag had been entwined from fine, sweet-smelling grasses, as fine as hair, yet intertwined so they were unbreakable. He felt it brush coolly against his cheek. The boy held the bag up to his nose, sniffing, trying to reveal the bag’s secrets. The bag smelled faintly of spices and teas: jasmine, cinnamon, and cardamom, as if it had once been carried by a trader on the silk road. He imagined camels walking across endless stretches of desert in the middle east, men in white robes selling teas of infinite variety, and powerful rulers sitting on gold gilded thrones looking down, ordering executions. He imagined the bag, hundreds of years ago being woven in China, later the grasses entwined into the original bag in northern Africa. Or maybe the bag had been woven of grass in the the Sahara Sesert found a century after it had been forgotten, buried in the sand. He imagined the many owners the bag must have had in its long lifetime. Some young: brave, defiant. Others older: sad, backs bent. Others: older still, smiling with eyes creased sadly from life, from the loss, the pain, the happiness, the love that turned bitter, sour, cruel, into anger, and hate. The boy blinked his eyes and looked at the bag one last time.
* * * *
The young boy dusted off the trunk. He could hear the words “Grandpa’s dead” being repeated, sobbed somewhere downstairs, yet he had never known his Grandpa. He knew he had been a traveler… but he didn’t know much else about him. He opened the trunk of Grandpa’s belongings and looked inside. A bag caught his attention; sparkling through the dust that covered it, calling him. He picked it up and held it closer to the light. And then, he began to imagine. And his Grandpa smiled.