The old man and the sixpence

She waited at the bus stop, lost in thoughts of what the day — the future in general, really — might have in store for her.  It was a big risk this, and she knew it. The first day of her new job, a job she had left everything behind for — family, friends, house and memories — to cross the country and start anew. She stared across the road through the constant stream of traffic, trying to ease her nerves and remember the path to take from the bus set down through the city’s streets to her new workplace.

A shuffling sound she had initially mistaken for the whisper of wheel rubber kissing bitumen brought her head around to see an elderly man approaching along the footpath. His short, sliding steps were not fast, but he displayed the economy of movement and familiarity seen from someone accustomed to working with slightly faulty tools. She looked up at him as he turned to sit on the bench beside her. His face was wrinkled, skin loose from age, corners of the mouth held down by cheek muscles bound with the worn elastic of old age, and despite the thick strands of white hair poking out around his temples, she immediately knew he was balding underneath the grey, woollen flat cap he wore. Her eyes met his for the brief moment before she looked away and she was surprised to see vibrant blue irises and perfect whites — a startling contrast next to the grey radiating out of every other part of him; from his bushy eyebrows to the grey trousers he wore.

She resumed staring through the traffic across the road, watching the old man in her periphery as he reached into the pocket of his sports jacket. A moment later she heard a faint metallic ping and turned her eyes in time to see a coin tumbling through the air, to be caught deftly on the old man’s hand. From his closed fist, he turned it out onto the back of his other hand. The coin showed heads.

The old man looked at the coin and as his face broke into a smile, all assumptions she had made about his disposition vanished. His whole face seemed to glow as the wrinkles came together to accentuate his sparkling blue eyes.

“Heads,” he breathed. Her bus arrived.

…