An Ordinary Saturday Night

On Saturday nights, he walked behind the library as she would have done had she not had to stay up past midnight studying existentialism. From the library’s floor to ceiling window she felt she was peering into another world, not quite unlike Alice with her looking glass. “But he wouldn’t know such things” she thought to herself, her lips moving to match the invisible words, for she was in a library: her future so it seemed. She was majoring in political science, but she knew her future wasn’t in books with such tangled and twisted language that it would spring up and attack those who dared go against its fiery letters.

It was her father, yes… the man standing there, picking up fallen things, reminded her of her father. “Young man— funny— what does that really mean? What’s the cutoff point” she wondered. “When does a young man become a man, become my father, the accuser abuser.

She stared at him from the window. When he turned around and looked up, as if some audible nightingale had betrayed her presence, she did not look away. The thin layer of glass between them was her shield. She needn’t cast her face down to the ground as she always did when looking at the faces of the people who surrounded her every day. And she wondered, “Is that football jersey a reflection of who he is, or is it something he uses to try to cover up his light?”