Food Court Doors

I smiled because the alternative was to see what I had become in the glass of her fear. The smile felt like a crack in a windshield, small and then suddenly the whole view.

Outside, a mower started again, later than usual, a neighbor finishing a strip he had left. A basketball missed. A dog barked. Nobody screamed. The town kept its voice down.

I sat in the chair I always sat in to put on shoes. I did not put on shoes. I sat because sitting made me a man in a room instead of a man in a van. Mira watched the sitting as if it were another lock.

Mira looked at me as if looking could open a door. I looked back because that was the point, if a point is allowed. I had wanted eyes. I had them. They were asking a question I had already answered with a van and a shoulder and a house that would not give her a street name.

“Where am I?” she said again, quieter, as if volume had been the problem.

I did not give her a street. I did not give her a town. I gave her the room and the window and the empty gun and the sound of a Saturday that had decided not to notice us.

“You are here,” I said again, and the sentence was true in the smallest, worst way a sentence can be true.