9B

  The Father sat statue like, with the rain no longer making him feel uncomfortable. His clothes were drenched and his fringe matted his face, casting a conspicuous veil on his otherwise and apparent vagabond complexion. And his socks and his boots, they squeaked every time that he pulled his legs back in under the seat to let people by.

  The people who passed him, though, they didn’t offer him a wink or a fledging nod as one normally would in light of a favor or a good deed. They just passed him by, huddling into one another and themselves, their necks sinking into their rising shoulders so as to keep the nagging droplets of rain from running down the necks of their shirts.

  He looked at each person. He looked at them all, all of them in the corner of their escaping eyes. None of them returned him the favor. It was as if he were a foreign word, something they couldn’t relate to, painted on the side of an ordinary thing, like a lamppost, or a wall or an old rusted freight train, the kind that was overgrown with yellow weeds and could be found in the strangest of places, places you’d never expect.

  As he pulled his legs back under his chair, his jeans dug into his cold thighs, making marks that he would only see later on, under a hot shower. He was invisible now, seated in the cold and blurred by lashing rain while, in the glass doors beside him, The Mother did what it was that she so needed to do.

  And like the rusted old train, so common, yet out of place, he sat in the freezing cold and pouring rain, without a track beneath him and he waited, for her to finish.