A Man called Brush

A man I meet says he used to sit beside me in school.
I don’t know him.

I ask when this was, thinking it might be someone who had a beard in school and is now clean shaven and that is why I don't recognise him.

In junior infants, he says.

I say I can't remember; mainly because my own children have been through senior infants since then and their children after them.
It's a generational thing.
He says he will never forget me and the time I won that spelling competition for a new pencil.

I won by spelling brush, I recall with a chilling flashback.

I put my hand in my pocket to give him some loose change; but stop when he tells me he is now a bank manager.

This he says apologetically as if he was destined for better things and is left on a ledge by a falling tide.

He says he likes my book.
That he has followed my progress since junior infants.
Which book, I ask, I have three published, and another to be published come the springing of the new year, I say immodestly.
Brush, he says and walks away.
I never wrote about a brush in my life.
I still don't know who he is.
Storytelling here