1962
- Luvv A Sanwal
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Short Story Summary - 1962 is a fiction short story set in an old house where strangers arrive, stay briefly, argue late into the night, and leave before dawn. Through the eyes of a child and the steady presence of his grandmother, the story explores urgency, fear, and the unseen weight people carry. What begins as an ordinary home slowly becomes a place where time itself seems to hesitate.
My grandmother’s house was never quiet, even after my grandfather died.
It sighed and shifted the way old bodies do. Floorboards complained when you crossed them, not angrily, just to be acknowledged. Windows whistled even when there was no wind, thin voices threading through the curtains. The walls smelled of time. Things happened there slowly. Kettles took longer to boil. Even grief seemed to sit before it spoke.
And people arrived.
At first, we thought she’d started renting rooms because money was tight. That was the sensible explanation. Men came with strange suitcases that clicked instead of clattered. No family names. Just first names, sometimes not even that. Women arrived with haircuts that didn’t belong to this decade, sharp or oddly practical, as if fashion had been stripped of decoration where they came from.
Everyone paid in gold pieces or diamond or unfamiliar currency wrapped carefully in cloth. Everyone stayed briefly. Everyone left before dawn, stepping out into the street like they were ashamed of being seen by daylight.
My grandmother treated them the same way she treated everyone.
She fed them first. Always first. Soup that smelled like comfort. Rotis rolled thin and steady. She gave them fresh sheets and warned them not to tuck the blankets too tight because “air needs room too.”
“No running water after midnight,” she said once, wagging a finger.
“And don’t move the furniture,” she told another. “The house remembers where things belong.”
When one man apologized too much, she cut him off. “Eat. Guilt makes food cold.”
She wrote their names in pencil in a small register kept beside the telephone. Light marks. Easy to erase.
Some nights, arguments spilled into the kitchen.
“You can’t stop it that way,” one man hissed, gripping the edge of the table.
“That’s not how it happens anymore,” another snapped, voice breaking.
“I’ve seen what comes after,” a woman said once, refusing seconds, her eyes fixed on nothing. “It’s worse if you’re wrong.”
They argued about dates. About machines. About bombs and skies and shortages. About diseases that spread faster than language could describe. About things that sounded like nightmares but were spoken with the exhaustion of people who had already survived them.
My grandmother listened while peeling potatoes.
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t interrupt. Didn’t ask for explanations she wouldn’t get anyway. Her knife hit the board with a steady rhythm. When voices rose too high, she cleared her throat. When tempers snapped, “This is a home,” she reminded them calmly. “Not a battlefield.”
One night, when the house was finally quiet, I asked her why she trusted strangers so easily.
She set down a bowl of soup and looked at me like the answer was obvious.
“They’re not strangers,” she said. “They’re just lost.”
By spring, she raised the rent.
“Urgency costs extra,” she told a man who tried to bargain. “So does shouting.”
They came and went. Always worried. Always convinced theirs was the last chance. One left notebooks behind, edges burned as if by accident or desperation. Another smashed the radio because it announced something he wasn’t ready to hear. One cried into the sink after the weather report, shoulders shaking silently.
My grandmother kept the house steady.
She made tea when people shook. Made beds when people collapsed mid-sentence. She stood in doorways, arms crossed, waiting for coins when people protested. Especially when they protested. “You want the future,” she’d say. “Then pay for the present.”
“Why make this harder?” one woman asked her, eyes wild, voice fraying. “Don’t you know what’s at stake?”
My grandmother wiped her hands on her apron. “If it’s the end of the world,” she said calmly, “you can afford to pay for a roof while you worry about it.”
Long after she was gone, I found the notebook.
Written boldly on the first page, addressed to me, were three words:
For when it’s time.
Beneath it, faint pencil lines traced footsteps through the house. I followed them. They led me to the loose floorboard beneath her bed, where gold, diamonds, and unfamiliar currencies rested quietly together. Beside them lay her small visitor diary.
Curiosity pulled me closer. I opened the diary.
Names. Dates.
And beneath them, lines that made my stomach tighten.
Kessler – April 9, 2079 – Nuclear escalation triggered by automated defense misfire
Rao – July 3, 2141 – Coastal evacuation collapse after multi-continent tsunami
Morales – November 18, 2096 – Global epidemic caused by failed containment protocol
Batra – March 17, 2084 – Atmospheric ignition during energy extraction trial
Nguyen – Undated – Freshwater collapse following polar melt acceleration
Ishikawa – February 2, 2122 – Artificial intelligence governance failure leading to war between human and robots.
My hands shook.
The strangers came rushing back.
The arguments at the table.
The fear.
The urgency.
The way every one of them arrived here first.
That’s when I understood.
My grandmother was never meant to help them fix the future. She was meant to slow them down. Because she knew that changing tomorrow would fracture today. That every correction will create a worse present, which will again give birth to more desperate & dangerous future.
A circle that fed on panic.
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