A handsome man with a brown/black-haired child-- freckled, long eyelashes-- climbs the stairs to the upper level of the train. The child has a long curve of a scar running from just above and to the left of the whorl of his cowlick, and down to his left ear. The child speaks slowly, a little dumbly, asking "what's yesterdaaaaay, what's yesterdaaaaay," and exclaiming as we pass junkyards, "another train." The man is responding patiently, but I have to wonder what sadness or resignation this man might have in his life-- perhaps his son's personality was stolen from him, either in some accident or defect, requiring his head to be opened, the electric-gelled-fat pieces within rearranged, reordered, removed...
More than once, he has asked his father, "where are we going?" And his father usually answers, but sometimes the child has to ask twice, before the father deigns to respond to the question he has answered more times than I think anyone would ever care to count. Again: "what's yesterdaaay." The question is ignored. The father wants to move on, but his son is stuck in a loop where he cannot make memories, he doesn't remember that they're going three more stops, two, one to Downer's Grove to get french fries.
They disembark. One last time: "where are we going?" And they walk away from the train-- the man holding, gently, patiently, his son's hand in his right, and a sweat-out Starbucks cup filled with warm remnants of some tea mixture in his left. On his fourth finger there is the silver sheen of a ring.
The son stares blankly at his father's under armour-clad torso-- eye level-- and worries his lip, biting it, with his teeth and forefinger. Nervous habit. Dad is on his phone, sending a quick text to their rendezvous, or perhaps checking apps to find a place with french fries. The train pulls away.
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