abuelo

“Remember Nieto. I’m a farmer, not a barber.”

Hilcias looked into his abuelo’s eyes.

They were farmer’s eyes, he thought. They were brown, the color of a field just after it is turned by plow in early spring. They were tired, weakened from years and years of looking for one more peach in a tree and one more tomato on a vine to fill his basket and make one more days pay. And they were kind because he was a migrant worker and had learned to look into the lives of people and see all that was human in them.

Then he looked at himself in the small, cracked mirror in his abuelo’s big, calloused hands.

His black hair was cut in a crooked line across his forehead and there were uneven gaps above his floppy ears. His own brown eyes sparkled like starlight off a mountain river on a dark, El Salvadoran night.

“Yep, you’re definitely not a barber,” he giggled.