A young person, likely around 12, and an adult person of a miscellaneous middle age board a subway car together. The young person has thick, curly, greasy, jet black hair. If they identify with the gender they present, they are a boy. The older person wears bug-eyed sunglasses and also has jet black hair, but theirs is wiry and pinned into a deflated donut on top of their head. If they identify with the gender they present, they are a woman. If one presumes a relational dynamic between the two, they are mother and son. If presuming makes one uncomfortable, caretaker and youth suffices.
As they are seated, the adolescent boy passes his backpack off to his mother. His hands are covered in Taki dust, being in the middle of a confounding but classic commuter snack. They settle in next to each other on seats that face the opposite direction of the train’s travel. The boy’s voracious consumption resumes before the train has time to lurch out of the station.
His young lips smack and rust colored saliva collects at the corners of his mouth. Between every few chips, his grandmother dangles an apple slice directly in front of his nose, waggling it a little to entice him. They are expertly cut transverse slices, core-less and thin. Even so, her offer is easily ignored. The boy continues to eat his chips unimpeded around her and her apple slices.
A few stops later, Taki's running low, the boy begins the Finishing a Bag of Chips Ceremony (patent pending): The Finger Lick (all four digits plus the thumb), followed by the straightening of the thrashed and violated bag in prep for the grand finale: The Gravity Crumb Dump.
Beautiful execution: 10/10.
Ceremony complete, he folds the bag in half twice on itself. And then, decidedly, he passes the trash to his nanny. Her hands are crossed at the wrists and attached to arms which wrap around his backpack in her lap. She takes the now flat purple bag between two fingers in her left hand, which also holds a crumpled tissue. In her right hand, she has a half-full plastic water bottle by the cap, and, like choreography, the boy pulls it away from her and begins to wash it all down. Drained.
She is less amused when he juts the empty bottle back at her and is almost shocked when he follows up immediately by jerking the tissue out of her hand. He wipes his dusty, greasy mouth and hands on the already well-used tissue, then offers it back to his sitter. She takes it, slowly, and though her sunglasses hide most of her face, a quick purse in her lips is unmistakable.
The boy sinks down into his seat, lays his head on his caretaker’s shoulder, and drifts off to sleep.
. . .
…Grand St. The next stop is DeKalb. Stand clear.
The boy stirs, bleary and disoriented. Where before his grandmother sat next to him, a big black trash can is now planted. The boy looks around in fear of being lost. Backpack clenched in his fist, he moves to rise, but is yanked back before he is able to stand fully, the straps of his bag trapped beneath the weight of the large metal trash receptacle. The doors ding! closed. A little frantic now, he turns his attention back to the seat to try and dislodge his pack.
His mother watches from out on the platform, peering in through the window just beyond the obstruction whose heft he fights. After a couple of fruitless heaves, finally he notices her and goes motionless, gaze fixed, jaw slack. She resembles the big can. The blackness of her hair, circle on top of her head, an opening; the similar rounded shininess of her sunglasses and the lacquered side of the bin; the wide, sturdy middle - both can hold a lot and yet only so much.
And whoosh, she’s gone.