The Old Man's Shrine

It's a small nook between two houses on a backstreet, surrounded by mossy stone walls cracked with age. Inside an overgrown garden around a small ramshackle shrine, incense candles long burned out, the only offerings are from a seventy year old grandfather in the house on the left. Under the eves lies a small shabby and wild dog, fast asleep as the rainy day plays on, its music, the pattering against the tiles and pooling in old pots.

Kioshi, 16. Not a great athlete and not particularly special in academics and lived with his uncle, a baker of note only in the neighbourhood. His only hobby was strumming on an old acoustic guitar with tired old strings. His feet pelted on the ground as he clung to his guitar case with one hand and held the flimsy umbrella with the other. He was closing in on the house when a loud crash echoed from within the next door garden. Fearing it was the old man across from them he paused at the entrance to see instead a local street dog he called Iro running circles.

Shaking his head, Kioshi backed out and kept on running, swinging open the front gate and up to the front door of their small house, taking off his shoes and hanging up his rain jacket. He ran past the kitchen where his uncle was cooking dinner with a quick greeting, then up the stairs and into his room where he pulled out his guitar and a new sheet of music he had picked up from music class. He strummed the notes out, pulling them off the page with practice as the sound wafted out of his window and to the garden below were a dog quieted down and waited.

‘Kioshi’ called his uncle who opened the door gently, ‘Kioshi’ he said before taking a deep breath, ‘Gramps passed away last night’. He wasn’t his real gramps but the old man across the way had passed for one better than most. Always there with a kind word and a treat for Kioshi when growing up, and had even taught his uncle a thing or two about baking. His children were long gone but with a lot still to give he spent his days pottering around the old shrine, helping uncle at his bakery or the people at the community centre down the road.

‘I am sorry Kioshi, I am... ‘ uncle sighed, ‘I am going to head around to his later tonight to sort his things out for his grandkids. It doesn’t look like they will be able to travel this time of year. Why don’t you have a think, maybe there is something we can leave at the shrine for the old man?’

Kioshi nodded quietly, then began to play again softly as his uncle quietly took his leave. Eventually Kioshi headed downstairs while it was dark but still raining and headed out the door back to the courtyard and the old shrine. The dog was still there, perched glumly under the eves, its eyes glowing in the dark as they followed Kioshi. It was then that Kioshi noticed the gramps' last offering, a small black leather book bound with a gold ribbon.

Kioshi picked it up and flipped the pages. It was notes, recipes and old photos. Photos of the old man when he was young, with his wife and children, of the shrine when it was first built, of people from the community, some more recently at the bakery with Kioshi’s uncle and a few were even of Kioshi as a kid. The flashbacks were like a weight on his chest that left him kneeling, the wild dog sidled up next to him and leaned against him. He left the little black notebook but took the dog with him when he headed back home, and his favourite photo, a photo of gramps and his adopted grandson riding on his shoulders.

In the days that followed the grandkids never came, but others did. People from around the neighbourhood who knew gramps, they left offerings at the shrine, the community even helped pay to have it restored raising over twenty thousand dollars. If you drive past now you can see it, the Bowing Street Shrine, or Gramp's Shrine to the locals. It's well maintained and almost as beautiful as the day it's mossy walls were first constructed and you might even get a glimpse of a scruffy dog running zommies around it if you're lucky.