NEW  Vedanta in Plain English, Book 1: Who Am I, Really.  Now available in paperback and eBook

Elena let herself in with a soft knock, balancing a paper sack against her hip. A bag of coffee and two tins clinked together inside.

“You leave the door unlocked on purpose?” she asked, setting the sack on the counter.

The old man glanced up from his chair. “It spares you the trouble of knocking.”

“Or spares you the trouble of answering.” She began putting things away, moving with the unhurried precision of someone who had already waited in three lines that morning. She held up the coffee. “Cupboard or counter?”

“Counter. Easier to reach when the news is bad.”

She raised an eyebrow, then slipped it onto the counter beside the kettle. “Then you’ll need it. Price went up again. And the good stuff—gone before sunrise.”

The old man folded his hands over his knee. “Fear is always expensive.”

Elena exhaled and lowered her bandanna. “It’s not just prices. They added another checkpoint by the pharmacy. Caleb was out there, barking orders like he’d been born with a badge.”

“Caleb?”

“You remember—Mrs. Ortega’s kid. Skinny, ran the bases too fast, always slid too early.”

“Ah.” The old man leaned back, eyes narrowing, as if he could still see the dust of a ballfield. “He liked to pretend he was older than he was.”

“Well, now he has a rifle to prove it.” She tapped the counter, restless. “He stopped me on my way back. Asked where I was born. Can you imagine? Where I was born, in my own neighborhood.”

The old man nodded once, as though ticking off a box on an invisible list. “That’s usually the third step.”

“The third step of what?”

He looked at her kindly, but with the faintest shadow of weariness. “The rhyme.”

Elena set the grocery bag on the counter, tugging the paper handles free from her wrist. A few items rolled toward the edge. She caught a tin with her palm and laughed. “You keep buying sardines. I thought you didn’t even like them.”

“They keep,” he said.

“So does rice.” She began sorting. “Where do you want them?”

“Second shelf, left of the clock.”

She reached up, then paused at the object beside it. “This is new.”

“It’s old.”

She lowered the tins of sardines slowly, as if the thing might crumble. “Looks like a compass.”

“It is. Though not a faithful one. It thinks north is whatever it can manage.”

“That sounds about right for these times,” she muttered, sliding it back into place.

They let the silence sit while the kettle whined. She tore the paper off a loaf of bread and began breaking it into small pieces, leaving crumbs like punctuation across the counter. She then, folded the bread bag tight and placed it between them, studying his face as if it were another antique on the shelf.

“You don’t get rattled, do you? Everyone else is twitching like birds. But you just…” She gestured at the room, the crumbs, the kettle. “…you just keep sweeping.”

Steam hissed as he lifted the kettle and poured into two mismatched mugs. The cups looked like strays, one chipped at the rim, the other stamped with a logo no one remembered. He slid the chipped one toward her.

“You always give me the broken one,” Elena said.

“It’s honest,” he replied. “Doesn’t pretend to be whole.”

She blew across the surface, then sipped. “Still hot.”

“That’s its only virtue.”

Her eyes wandered again to the shelf. A brass bell, green with age, caught her attention. She tilted her head. “Where’d you get that?”

“Lisbon. Or Cadiz. Hard to tell now.”

“You travel a lot?”

“I stayed in places until they stopped pretending to be permanent. Then I left.”

She tapped the bell with her fingernail, and the sound was thin, high, quick to vanish.

“Like here.”

“Exactly.”

She leaned back in her chair, bread in one hand, mug in the other. “You keep so many things, though. You leave, but you carry pieces with you.”

He shrugged. “They remind me that the play is old. Same actors, different costumes. Easier to remember with props.”

Her mouth tugged at a smile. “You make it sound like theater.”

“It is,” he said. “But not the kind you buy tickets for.”

She laughed softly, shaking her head. “Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Neither can I,” he said, and took a slow sip.

The clock on the wall ticked without moving. Elena’s eyes followed the frozen hands. “Always midnight,” she said.

“It stopped long ago,” he answered. “Midnight just happens to be where it decided to rest.”

The loudspeaker’s bark carried into the room, flat and metallic: “Papers. Papers ready.” 

Elena set her mug down hard enough to rattle the chipped rim. “They’ve moved the checkpoint closer,” she said. “You can hear it from here.”

The old man tilted his head, listening, but with no comment.

“They pulled Mrs. Alvarez from her car yesterday,” Elena went on. “Made her stand with her grandson while they dumped everything on the sidewalk. He cried until he hiccupped. She hasn’t left the block since.”

He traced the rim of his cup with one finger. “First the trunks,” he said. “Then the doors.”

Her jaw clenched. “You talk like it’s already written.”

“I’ve seen enough drafts,” he answered.

She studied him for a moment, torn between wanting comfort and resenting his calm. “Should I take that as a warning, or are you just narrating?”

“Both,” he said. “Because it makes no difference which you hear, so long as you’re listening.”

Elena glanced toward the window. The light was slanting differently now, catching dust in the air.  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be listening for,” she said. “It all just sounds like static. Fear, noise, shouting, rumors. Half the time I don’t even trust what I see.”

“That’s because you’re seeing pieces,” the old man said. “Shards thrown from a larger pattern. You recognize the edge of a shape, but not the shape itself.”

She rubbed her forehead. “And you see the shape?”

“I’ve seen enough of them to stop calling them new.”

She looked down. “But if it’s all pattern… then what’s the point? Why bother resisting if the rhyme just repeats?”

He didn’t answer right away. The kettle gave a last sigh, metal adjusting to the cooling room. Finally, he said, “Because the point isn’t to change the rhythm. It’s to stop being its instrument.”

She raised her eyes to him. “You’re not here to rewrite the poem,” he continued. “Just to stop reciting it in your sleep.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Elena reached for a crumb on the table and rolled it between her fingers. “And if I’m awake?”

“Then you choose. Not react. Not flinch. Not echo. Choose.”

“That’s still resistance.”

“It is. But it comes from clarity, not panic.”

She shook her head gently. “You make it sound simple.”

“It’s not,” he said. “But it’s clean.”

Outside, a car horn blared twice—short, nervous. The kind that says “move” without saying who to. Elena stood, walked to the window, and peered through the curtain.

“More soldiers. Not from here. I don’t recognize the patch on their arms.”

The old man stayed seated. “Imported uniforms. That’s the fifth step.”

She didn’t ask what the sixth was. Instead, she turned from the window and leaned against the counter.  “My father used to say it couldn’t happen here. That America had too many checks, too much freedom. He said the people would never allow it.”

He nodded, slow. “That’s the myth.”

“What myth?”

“That the people stop things. They don’t. Patterns stop when they’ve run their course. The people just believe they helped.”

Elena let out a breath that was half a laugh. “You really know how to lift a girl’s spirits.”

He smiled faintly. “I’m not here to lift them. Only to keep them from drowning.”

She crossed back to the table and picked up her mug again. “What about you? Did you ever resist? Or were you always this… peaceful?”

“I’ve resisted in all the wrong ways,” he said. “That’s how I learned which ones are right.”

Elena sipped. The coffee had cooled. “So what do I do, exactly? Wait? Watch?”

“You act,” he said. “But not from fear. Not to save the world. That’s just another mask of panic. You act from stillness. From knowing the fire is not yours, but the water might be.”

She blinked. “That sounds like something from a fortune cookie.”

“Then may it be the only true one you get,” he said, lifting his cup.

They drank. Somewhere in the distance, the loudspeaker barked again.

Elena set her mug down with care. “There’s something else,” she said. “I didn’t want to lead with it.”

The old man looked at her without urgency, only patience. “Then now’s the time.”

She hesitated. “A friend of mine—Sara—she was supposed to leave last week. Had everything packed. Papers, permits, safe house lined up in Oregon.”

He nodded slowly.

“She didn’t go.”

“Why not?”

Elena opened her hands helplessly. “Said she couldn’t leave her mother behind. Said she had a feeling. Said she’d wait one more week.”

The old man said nothing.

“She disappeared yesterday.”

Still he said nothing.

“She’s not the first.”

“No,” he said gently. “She won’t be the last.”

“I want to be angry at her,” Elena whispered. “For waiting. For believing she had more time. But part of me… I get it. You want to believe the story will turn. That the pattern’s bluffing.”

He turned his cup in his hands. “The pattern isn’t cruel. It’s just indifferent.”

She looked at him sharply. “That’s worse.”

“No,” he said. “Cruelty feeds on your reaction. Indifference doesn’t care what you do. Which means you’re free.”

Elena blinked, not ready for that. “Free?”

“You don’t have to hate it. You don’t have to be eaten by it. You can step outside the fire, even if it burns around you.”

She frowned. “You talk like you’ve done this before.”

“I’ve done it many ways,” he said. “And suffered each time I thought it was personal.”

That stopped her.

“I don’t mean your friend doesn’t matter,” he added. “But if you carry her loss as proof that the world is broken, it will crush you. If you carry it as proof that people make choices—even tragic ones—it may still hurt, but it will not paralyze.”

She took that in, chewing her bottom lip. “Is that what you did? With the places you left?”

He gave a soft laugh. “No. I ran. I blamed. I cried in foreign languages. Took years to stop fighting the script and start studying it.”

She smirked. “Sounds like you became a historian.”

He raised a brow. “History is just memory with footnotes. I’m interested in the memory without the ego.”

Elena stood again, restless, and wandered to the shelves. Her fingers hovered over a small frame—some kind of etching, half-faded. “Is that a city?”

“Was,” he said.

“Which one?”

He shrugged. “Could’ve been Kraków. Could’ve been Aleppo.”

She turned. “You were there?”

“I’ve been everywhere when it falls.”

She stared at him. “Then why stay here?”

“Because this time, I’m not running. I’ll stay and sweep, even if the ceiling collapses.”

Elena’s voice was quiet. “You think it will?”

He met her eyes. “I think the ceiling doesn’t matter as much as what you’re standing on.”

Elena didn’t speak for a while. She stared at the floor beneath her shoes, half-expecting it to creak or shift, but it remained still. The kind of stillness that had nothing to prove.

“I used to think standing for something meant raising your voice,” she said. “Holding a sign. Arguing louder than the other side.”

He nodded gently. “That’s what the fire wants you to think.”

She glanced at him. “So what do I stand on, then?”

The old man looked at her—not with answers, but with the kind of clarity that dissolves the question itself. “Something that doesn’t burn.”

Her lip twitched, almost a smile. “You really don’t go in for slogans, do you?”

“Slogans are the ash left after meaning has caught fire,” he said. “I prefer whatever comes before the match is struck.”

Outside, a gust of wind swept a paper flyer across the window. Neither of them turned to look.

She returned to the table, sat down, and pulled the mug close again, though it had long gone cold. Her fingers curled around it anyway. “You think anyone’s left who still sees it?”

“The ember under the noise?”

She nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re one of them.”

Her throat tightened unexpectedly. She looked away. “That’s a heavy thing to say.”

“It’s not heavy,” he said. “It’s just rare.”

A knock echoed distantly—not at the door, but from somewhere beyond the block. Not urgent. Just presence.

Elena stood, gathering herself. “I should go before someone decides to ask where I’ve been.”

He didn’t stop her.

At the door, she turned back. “Will you still be here next week?”

He gave the same faint smile he had when she asked about Lisbon. “If the roof allows.”

She gave a slow nod, then opened the door. Outside, the wind had changed. It didn’t smell like smoke yet, but something dry and waiting.

She paused on the threshold.

“Is it wrong to hope?” she asked over her shoulder.

“No,” he said. “Just don’t expect it to knock.”

She smiled—this time without sarcasm—and stepped into the street.

The door closed with a whisper.

And the clock on the wall kept midnight, unbothered by the world.

The old man didn’t move. He listened to the quiet that returned like an old companion. The wind, the clock, the breath of the room—it all exhaled together.

A long shadow crossed the window—someone walking past, slow, hunched, holding a sack to their chest. Then another. The hour was shifting. People were still trying to live.

He rose at last and gathered the mugs, rinsing them one by one beneath the thin stream of tap water. The chipped one caught the light. He dried it with a towel worn soft at the edges and placed it back on its hook.

At the shelf, he adjusted the compass slightly, so its needle pointed toward the door.

Then he opened the small frame—the faded etching—and slipped a folded piece of paper behind it. A name, a date, a place. Nothing more.

Outside, the wind scattered dust across the street and turned the flyer against the curb.

The old man returned to his chair, hands folded again over his knee. Through the window, the sky was thinning—a pale, strange blue just beginning to push through the smoke.

He watched without judgment. He’d seen skies like this before.

Then, slowly, he closed his eyes.

And the house held its breath, as if listening for a knock that hadn’t yet come.