'Fur' by Shahema Tafader

The chair is the colour of baked beans - red with hints of brown. Its seat is covered with the fur of a wolf who was slain by my grandpa that year when the snow piled higher than a two-year-old child. 

I was that two-year-old child.

My fondest memories are of those winter nights, sitting at my grandpa’s feet, the hearth filled with crackling flames, my face red and prickly, my grandpa sitting on his fur-covered sofa, smoking a brown pipe. 

We didn’t have a care in the world then. 

How times change. 

Now I sit on the same floor, with the same fireplace and sofa behind me; but my grandpa is gone. Left in his place is the flattened fur, moulded through his years of sitting. 

His years of living.