Seating Arrangements
The old man entered the waiting room and scanned the loop of heads around the perimeter and then the smaller cluster of hairy, blonde, grey, red, and even purple islands in the center, looking for a gap that would indicate either an end table or an empty seat. A large woman, nothing, then a teenager with a dangerous boil on his cheek, but an open seat was an open seat.
Unless that open seat was occupied by a large, black handbag.
The old man looked at the bag, then made eye contact with the large woman. The woman placed a ground-beefy hand on the bag and the head of a tiny, smug dog, or maybe it was a self-entitled rat, popped up between the flaps. The two creatures squished their faces at the old man.
The only open space of wall was a flimsy barrier that separated the waiting room from another waiting room, so the old man didn’t risk leaning upon it and, instead, stood a few feet in front of the rat-dog who stared at the old man’s loafers. The old man stared at his loafers too and he thought about how he’d never really had a place to sit.
Before the war, or at least, before the old man was in the war, seats were for ladies with babies and ladies whose babies had grown into ladies with babies.
And then when there were no ladies with babies to take the seats, there were no seats at all, only dirt and sometimes mud and the old man and others did things called sit-ups, but those had nothing to do with sitting. The only thing that resembled sitting was the thing that everyone did in their bunks before they laid down to sleep, but that’s not sitting because a bed is not a seat and that’s just the thing you do before you lean back until you’re flat on the mattress.
And in the jungle, the old man would look at an exploded nub of a tree and wonder if the people who lived in the jungle even had a word for seat.
The rat yapped at the old man and someone mispronounced his name.
The old man slowly lowered his khakied bottom closer to the white paper strip that ran across the burgundy cushion. He never liked the crinkle crunch the paper made. Even when his butt was much smaller, he would try to balance on the edge of exposed cushion.
A doctor threw the door open, causing the old man to stand at attention. The doctor told the old man there was no need to sit down, that he had no updates for the old man, and then something like a goodbye which was really more of an okay well then.
The bus home was crowded and the old man wasn’t quite angry, as he stood listening to his muscles drying out, but he was getting there.
He couldn’t remember the last time he truly sat down. Maybe it was seventy-eight years earlier, when the old man was a baby, and he’d rolled around on his back until he found himself balanced on the puff of his diaper for six seconds until a small wobble sent him prostrate into a couch cushion. That moment when he thought that there must be something better to look at than that dusty, spinning thing up there and these boring beige loops of rough stuff down here.
But the old man couldn’t think back that far, so the best he could come up with was the last day of junior high, right after the Pledge of Allegiance had ended. The old man had removed his hand from his heart and plopped into that wooden desk chair like it was a pit full of goose-down feathers.
The old man thought fat people were lucky because they always had a cushion. But the old man was thin and every time the bus hit a pot hole, he could feel his knee bones colliding, little bits breaking off and nestling into the loose folds of his skin.
When the old man arrived home, his daughter and son-in-law were wedged into the big green chair, which the old man had bought for himself. And the old man’s wife was splayed on the couch. The trio continued a heated debate about chicken sandwiches while the old man, tired of waiting for a seat to open up, began bending his knees, lessening the distance between the seat of his pants and the floor. When he believed he was nearly there, he unclenched his fists, let go of the air, and allowed himself to freefall backwards several inches. He hit land and, for a moment, was stunned that he made it without breaking into a million pieces.
He grabbed his ankles and pulled his legs into an X. He might have smiled. He knew it wasn’t a seat, but he knew it was the best he was going to get for the rest of his life, until that moment when the last person to ever touch him would sit him up in his wooden box and slowly lean him back onto the white satin. But that isn’t really sitting, it’s just that thing you do before you go to sleep forever. So there he sat, cross-legged and ignorant, like a very wrinkled child.
Note from the writer (clearly): Any feedback, questions, criticism, or praise is welcome. This is only a second draft, so it’s still quite unpolished. Thanks for reading!
