The 2:45 whipped past and it was all he could do to keep his cap from taking flight. As the train slowed, the young man adjusted his tie and brushed the dust off of his jacket. Then there was the squealing metal and the eruption of people, as though the gates of Hell had broken, which flooded the platform. The young man waited. A red hat, held firmly against a fair-haired young woman by a porcelain hand, floated towards him. Anticipating the young woman’s embrace, the young man was startled by a grasped shoulder from a warm-blooded figure behind him. He whipped around to find an older man in a tattered suit holding an equally ragged cup.
“Hey buddy, think you could spare a quarter?”
The young man reached into his pocket and pretended to check for change, even though he knew it was as empty as they day he got the pants.
“Sorry. Wish I could help you out, but I can’t.”
“Yeah, yeah,” continued the beggar. “That’s what they all say. Look at you in your Sunday best, sayin’ you can’t spare a poor man a couple cents. You ain’t going anywhere in your life, sir, unless you grow a heart!”
The young man said nothing.
He felt a cool hand grasp his wrist from behind. He turned around again and held her tight. Then they walked down the road to a small park. Sitting down on a bench, the young man watched a performer on the other side of the park, strumming a guitar and belting out a song about the war or something tragic like that.
“How are things around here?” she asked, finally.
“Been better,” was all the young man said.
“You know I told you my father offered you a job back at home. Why don’t you get out of this damn town and come back with me?”
He looked back at the musician and the people who walked by without paying him any mind.
“Did you hear me? Come back and everything will be just fine.”
He said nothing.
“What’s the matter with you? All you do is sit around all day sulking about how you’ve got nothing and you’re going nowhere and papa said you could come home with me and he’d get you a real good job. We could be happy,” she said, then added, “together.”
“I’m not sure,” was all he said.
“Not sure about what?” she asked, starting to get hysterical. “Not sure about the job? Not sure about moving out of this damn place? Or are you not sure about us, about being happy with me?”
“I guess,” he started, and then his eyes broke focus from the guitarist and turned to her, “I guess I’m just not looking for that type of happiness.”
He looked at his feet to avoid the inevitable pull of the jowls and heave of her breast. He spit on his shoe to try and clear the dust from it, but it only made a muddy puddle that spilled over the side and onto the ground.
“I see,” she managed to squeeze out between tears.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the ground.
He rose and walked across the park and stood in front of the performer’s guitar case. He glanced at the handful of change that caught the light of the sun. The young man held his hands tight and still in his pockets. He felt the fabric lining around his hot hands. At the end of the song the young man gave a polite clap and turned to look at the young woman in the red hat. He watched the empty sobs shake her body, but he did not move one step closer to her. The young man reached into his jacket and pulled a silver pocket watch, a gift from his late father, out of his vest. He hadn’t wound it since before the funeral, and the cogs and gears had long since stopped moving. Flipping it over, he gently rubbed his fingers over the engraved back.
Faber est suae quisque fortunae. “Every man is the maker of his own fortune,” as his father had preached to him when he was an even younger man.
The young man looked back at the performer, then unclipped the pocket watch from his vest and tossed it into the musician’s case.
Then he listened for a few minutes to a song about something tragic.
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Submission Name: The Application of Values
