They sit, immersed in amusements of now, shading their eyes against the sunlight leaking through the windows of this poorly lit breakfast box. In the young one's hands rests the undeveloped understanding of mother's participation in the dwarfing of her partially formed future. Because as life loiters on, the less enamored and focused the illusion of our surroundings persist to be, and the more suspect we become of the divots and scratches those who walked before etched into the pathways of our indifference. So I sit against them. I outline their bleakness. I remove them from this situation and place them amongst environs more fitting of the mess they exude. Dirt collected in the corners of their mouths like muddy inlets clogged by the spent shell casings of everything they drawl. Our eyes meet; chewing mouths slow when intellectual edicts are drawn to define this reciprocal curiosity. Brain stems occupy greater limited resources when familiarity fails to make solacing matches. Artless gnawing slows to painful pause. Eyes no longer rely on bumbling chicanery to sell their figment product of chance engagement. Fixed and convinced, the mother's swollen gape opens with the inaugural elucidations on this moment's precedings. Teeth, tongue, and lips arching in familiar synchronicity to propel forth the complicated byproduct of evolution's greatest collator.
At long last, with parched elbows perched rigid, she jostles free a gust of intellectual ado:
"What..in the fuck...are you looking at?"
Nothing, pancake buzzard. Nothing at all.
