To Go

The woman is holding her arms around the man’s neck, probably her father, like she is six years old, but she is at least five times older than that. She’s holding onto him as if she fears letting him go. I can’t tell if it’s her comforting him or him comforting her. I know she sees me taking the slightest glimpses of her, but she can’t blame someone for staring in a crowded place; where better to see someone you love off than in a crowded place? I can see by his snow-shade hair that he’s too old to be going off to the army but not too young to go off to some other battlefront where nurses are the enemy and your comrades are anyone that can play a good game of poker without digging up too many graves in conversation or asking if you heard that so-and-so died last week.

Her husband comes in, bald, hulkingly present like the giant ape that took that woman on top of that building in that old black and white movie… but here it is, remade again, without Peter Jackson’s help: the woman, grasping onto the old man, pleading to rescue her from the heights that the ape has brought her, but the old man can only stand there, tall and silent like the building he’s always been.

Not a word has passed between them, maiden in distress and tall citadel, each waiting for the other to move, but she won’t let go and he won’t make her let go, so they just stand there: stalemate. The husband, in camo shorts and black T-shirt, sunglasses slowly moving away from his face to his forehead turns his gaze from father-in-law and wife and asks me, “How much is it for one burger to go?”