By Shelagh Powers Johnson
I watch their hands as they sit side by side: her fingers worrying the felt pad tucked beneath her beer glass, his tapping an impatient rhythm on the wood of the table top. They’re polite to me and to each other but there’s a tension in the air, a cord pulled tight, fraying, threatening to snap. They drink fast, too fast, and then they’re ordering more; she’s watching him and he’s watching me, and I can tell he wants to impress us with his clumsy, broken Spanish. I pretend not to understand English so they’ll speak freely, but their conversation has the stumbling cadence of strangers filling lost time. He whispers something to her and puts a hand on her knee, a tender gesture that raises goosebumps on my arms. She smiles uncertainly, a child aiming to please but unsure of the rules, and I stifle the unbidden impulse to mother her, to reach down and swat him away. Silence bloats and settles between them.
They keep drinking and when I return with a third round, I can see that the drinks have begun to dull their edges. They’re drinking anís faster than it’s meant to be drunk, saying things to each other in hushed tones meant to be shouted. I go back into the bar, light a cigarette and watch them through the lazy sway of the beaded curtain that separates us. They’re staring at nothing, quiet again, their lips set in sad straight lines. In Castejón we bellow our anger and our love; we hit with our words and sometimes with the flat of our palms, but rarely with our silence. I blow a hot line of smoke out a cracked window above the bar and tighten the damp apron around my hips, but I don’t go back outside. They’re talking again: I can hear the even simmer of their voices, measured pleas churning between them without crescendo, tidy and aimless.
Then the man calls for another round in his halting Spanish, and his tone is less gentle than before, less about the ritual and more about the beer he wants to drink. I rinse two more glasses and fill them to the brim, and then I stand listening at the curtain with the beers in my hands, but the couple has gone quiet. Their train is coming soon, an express to Madrid, and I wonder for a moment what happens to the delicate inertia of two people careering toward a shared destination when together they’re going nowhere at all.
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Shelagh Powers Johnson teaches Creative Writing at Bowie State University and is faculty editor of the university’s literary magazine, The Torch. She received her MFA in Fiction from American University, and her work has been featured in The Portland Review, Apt, and Typishly, among many others, and anthologized in The Grace and Gravity Collection of DC Women Writers. Her most recent story is featured in the March issue of Ghost Parachute.