Luke Cage
by
Shenandoah
The arm of the black chair wobbled every time his grandmother sat in it, and it was her favorite, hand-me-down piece of furniture in the old, nineteenth-century Victorian home. Carl, an African American teenager approximately sixteen-years-old, loved his grandmother, and he wanted to do whatever he had to do in order to fix that old, dilapidated chair. It didn't mean much to him, that chair, but he knew how his grandmother felt about the rundown piece of furniture. It had some kind of significance in her life that went back many years-sixty plus years or more. Her father owned the chair, and he purchased the thing from an antique dealer in southern Oklahoma during the Vietnam War era.
A troubled young man, disregarded by his Momma, moved in with his grandmother around the age of six; and even though Carl appreciated her for taking him into her home, he longed to know his Momma. Angered, he sat in his room on many nights questioning his worth as a human being because of the way she abandoned him. That was probably the reason Carl felt the need to fix that rickety chair because he wanted his grandmother to always want him around. There was nothing more painful to him than the day his Momma decided to leave him; and if he lost his grandmother, he couldn't imagine what would happen to his life. People seemed to leave when things were broken; so, the quicker he fixed the chair, the quicker he could feel normal.
It was around the end of May in twenty-fifteen, when Carl purchased the parts needed in order to tighten the screws on his grandmother's ramshackle rocking chair. He worked a little job at Harvey's Grocery Store bagging groceries, and the majority of people tipped well. He had spent all week thinking about his grandmother's old, wooden chair, and was elated that he finally had enough money to buy the screws. When he came into the living room, his grandmother sat quietly in the chair. She didn't say a word, even though he shook her by the shoulder several times. He thought it was odd that she didn't murmur a word because she usually slept light. The slightest bump or sound brought her running, but now. When he placed the back of his left hand on her forehead, he realized that she was dead, and it sent a rage through his heart.