Woman Waiting
She fidgets with her hands, her right thumb rubbing her left index finger, then thump on her left knuckle. Rub, rub, thump, thump. Her eyes glance left, then right, then jittery left again before settling straight ahead, over the horizon, right in front of her.
He walks up beside her and sits next to her. He looks at her face, then down to her hands. She doesn’t look his way, doesn’t move, doesn’t seem to be aware of his presence at all. She keeps scanning, keeps fidgeting. Rub, rub, thump, thump.
His brows furrow and his lips form a half-frown, a barely audible consternate sigh escaping his throat. He reaches for her hand, but just before touching her he thinks better of it.
Rub, rub, thump, thump.
Her heart yearns for a thing that it does not know, a plight nebulous, a disposition inauspicious. She had a reason, there was a reason she was sitting there, but she doesn’t know what that reason is anymore. She doesn’t know why or who or how, or when. She rubs and so she thumps. Her eyes look everywhere near and far, quickly looking this way and that, desperately afraid of missing the thing she sat down to wait for which she cannot remember anymore.
He places his hand on her thigh and lets it settle there. She has devoted every scrap of attention to what her eyes can see. She is unaware. She is utterly locked in a chronic moment she has lost the faculty to yield.
He sits there with her. He will stay there. Rub, rub, thump, thump.
