Chess and Old Men
It was an afternoon late in August when Mia first saw him, counting her steps in even numbers as she walked. “Two, four, six, eight, ten…” Heat was bouncing off the roads and pirouetting off in the air. Instead of taking her usual way home, she decided to walk through the square and see if the leaves had turned. Counting, “eighteen, twenty, twenty-two,” under her breath she looked around at the benches which were scattered about. There was a bench supporting a young mom, her baby in a car seat and her eyes glued to a phone. There was a bench that held a teenage boy, slouching and smoking a cigarette. Mia coughed and walked on.