A Good Reason For Doing Nothing

The dark-eyed girl, not of pretty features though of adequate ones, took the long drag of a filtered menthol cigarette; seemingly, her state of affairs was being sorted and resorted at the moment the smoke was exhaled. A circular table, with her half-empty cigarette pack, pink ballpoint pen, stack of dog-earred pages in text books, was barely visible and to the rear of the dimly-lit snack bar. It was not frequented often this late at night.

She knew nothing of the silent, half-engaged existences who passed her, in step, on the way to her new semester of classes. Slipping down into the depths of the empty room, with its row of vending machines full of candy, soda, potato chips and the like, gave her the relief of a place where someone could possibly be greeting her with an important briefcase. There was nowhere she needed to hustle off to: nothing which made her confirm that her schedule was busy enough, or even enough.

She opened the nearest text, Geography Of Mankind. Table 18-4 of the Crude Birth and Net Reproduction Ratios For Selected Countries. It provided the explanation for her to take up the pink ball point, disinterested, laughing a slim laugh as the vending machines hummed. She remained quite unaware that there was another, singular existence slumped back in a booth below the basement window.

Her pen skimmed the pages as she asked herself, accidently aloud: "There were no flies on Frank that morning--after all why not?" Her carefully scrawled geography notes still in tact. She pondered the ceiling above. It was like a mudlark grasping for a scrap of food. She didn't know what to say to the hunched figure in the corner. He barely moved yet got wide-eyed and smiled acknowledging that he had heard the enigmatic remark.

To be free as the eagle, was surely not the goal of the fly: she thought. Was it too much sky wrapping this whole living earthen fireball, that made her want to accept the turn of the seasons with no wish to ask for more days of sunshine less rain or muggy afternoon? The question was not answered inside the pages of the geography book. She had been under the influence of an intellectual buzz for close to an hour and a half, yet still she did not dog-ear the pages, slap the book shut.

It was only when she got up, sloughing off the thought of tired shoulders, that she noticed how mysterious the light-haired boy was acting, as he stared vacuously into the empty table of the booth. His hands were hidden underneath the booth's table and it occurred to her that he might be sleeping, upright. She dropped a quarter into the soda machine, saying nothing to him. As the fliptop ripped open, he cleared his throat distinctly; distinctly enough for her to know he had been watching her, indeed.

"You could say that Frank was too goddamn tired to notice that he'd been covered with flies that morning.", the young fellow said, as he brought his hand out from under the table, laying them open, then closing them like the halves of a book. "Couldn't you?"

She tilted the soda can, swallowed with a lump in her throat, caught in amongst the scattered papers and the geography text which had been turned to Table 18-5 Mortality Rates and Life Expectancy For Selected Countries. She licked the last drop of her soda enough for him to know she had been watching him,indeed.

Distantly, the sky had turned over for the night outside the basement window. So they walked out into the brisk winter air together--just the two of them.What had possessed her to dream of taking up a proposition to visit his "room"? Who knows? Noone else came to sit down in the snack bar the rest of that night. That night, was a good reason for doing nothing.