So A Boy Walks Into a Bar...
Two women walk into a bar.
This is not the joke it should be, though they're laughing together, the oldest of friends (have known each other for at least fifty years now, though time doesn't pass similarly Over There). They wait by the door, their usual table, twin mugs of stout.
Someone's coming today.
They haven't been waiting for him. They've led full lives (the brunette, five; the redhead, two) without him. The brunette was a senator, a patroness of the arts, a ballerina and a dancehall girl; the redhead returned as a party girl and died face-down on a shag carpet. They've had boyfriends, lovers, husbands and children; they've loved without measure. Yet somehow....
Well, they haven't been waiting around for him, in any event.
"Do you think," the redhead wonders, "he'll have the same sort of glare?"
"He'd best not. 'Tis the first time in seven hundred years I've set sight on him."
"You're always gonna have me beat there," the redhead pouts.
"Tis no contest between us," she points out. "Hath never been." Funny how the old speech patterns return to her now...
"Should we yell surprise or something?"
"T'wil be overwhelming enough to see us both in a single place." His life has been happily unhappy, difficult but joyful.
"Might give him another heart attack..."
"Aye."
The redhead twirls her cocktail skewer between her fingers - a little blue pirate sword. "I wish he'd get here."
They've waited fifty years. They'll wait an hour more.
When the door opens, they're talking about the other men they've had, the children they raised and cannot see. He shows up - typical of the man - just when they're not thinking of him.
He watches them, confused, elated, young again.
But they'll wait where they are. Let him come, they share the thought. Let him come.