Monty's

-1-

"Your food's getting cold."

"I don't want it."

"Look, I know it might not be as good as the food your father would make for you, but I promise it's good. I'm sure that you'd like it if you'd just give it a tr-"

"I'm not hungry. I told you already," he interrupted.

"This is the second night in a row that those words come out of your mouth. A growing boy like you needs to eat something... Are you even listening? Ryan?"

The sound of the building settling drowned out the silence that followed as Ryan and the woman sat across from each other, neither of them daring to initiate eye contact. Between them, the worn, olive-tinted wooden table from decades ago acted as a painful reminder that December had come, and Ryan would no longer be able to spend his evenings watching the sun set over the pecan trees from the roof of his father's barn. Here, there was brick. There was metal and there was concrete. Clouds, noise, smog, and people - thousands of them. Sunsets in the city were only a time of day, not a work of art.

His clothes felt too tight and too loose at the same time. Dark came too early and the walls smelled like paint thinner and when the old man in the apartment above them flushed, he could hear it trickle all the way down like little watery spiders running through through the pipes in the kitchen. Idle drafts infested the woman's apartment like unwelcome rats. Ryan's breathing grew thick. He pressed his dangling legs close together and pulled his shirt's short sleeves down as far as he could but his cheeks still wore red and the hairs on his arms grew little bumps near the surface of his pale skin. His body and his words shivering, he finally spoke.

"I'm cold."

"Well, eat your food... you'll be warmer if you-"

"I wanna go to my room," he interrupted.

"But you need-"

"May I please be excused?"

"I'll go get you your jacket from the-"

"Please? May I be excused?"

He was twirling the dull, aged silverware around, expecting a quick, angry retaliation, but none came. Her silence startled him. After a brief, wordless moment, his watery gaze slowly, timidly crept up from the table's chipping paint and the untouched plate of colorless food to meet hers. Flooded eye to flooded eye.

She shook her head in disbelief or disappointment or guilt or some jigsaw puzzle of emotions that she couldn't make fit together. A defeated, frustrated sigh escaped her like it was a dying breath and she could only find enough composure to nod and shakily whisper, "Yes, son. You may go to your room."