The waiter was thin and confident by all measure. It looked like he had a thing for the girl who danced around pouring everyone’s coffees to different levels.  The two moved well through the crowded house-turned-restaurant.  They didn’t get a moment that didn’t require dodging an arm or leg of some patron, and they didn’t mind.

    “I wish we came here every weekend,” she sat across from me with eyes alight. Mine must have been the same.

    Our food came and we ate and spoke and laughed.  Every time the door opened to crowd more people in, six action figures hanging from the ceiling lowered and raised in accordance. It took us five minutes to admit to each other that we saw anything.

    “Is it?“

    “Are they?”

    “They are.”

    “I thought I was crazy.”

    “Me too.”

    “No one else is looking.”

    “Maybe we are crazy.”

    She laughed loud and I chuckled low and I knew I could not describe how I felt then if I tried for a hundred years. We left cash for the bill and, as we walked out, we waved back to the waiter to say thanks. My hand grasped the wooden door and I felt gratitude towards the damp little building for everything it had given us.

    The boy walked home from school and kicked a rock into the bumper of a car. The noise rang up and down the empty street. He turned and found a girl behind him, as scared as he was. He ran. She followed. Their backpacks acted unruly and bounced everywhere and made a lot of noise.

    “Stop following me!” he yelled.

    She passed him and continued running.

    “Stop following me!” she yelled.

     “I have to get away!” He called back, and pulled on her backpack until he was ahead of her.

    “I’m not chasing you!” She kicked his leg and he went down hard on the pavement, his backpack spilling out its contents over the sidewalk.

    The girl felt badly about kicking him and the mess, so she stopped and helped him scoop up his belongings. The boy zipped up his backpack, looked at her, and said, “Let’s go! Quick!”

    They ran home together that day and, every day after, they passed by the dented bumper and exchanged guilty smiles.

We rose stretched, while the younger ones rushed around us, each on their own desperate path. This day would not be long enough. An entire age wouldn't be enough for them. It had taken them that long to forge my grandfathers, the first of our kind. I assumed that's why they rushed: by our feet, over our toes, up our spines. Rain fell, and they acknowledged it in ever way but way to enjoy it. The sun shone, but none so even glanced upward. They only rushed on, and we wondered how these should be our Gods. They only built, and consumed, but never thought to acknowledge that they were indeed breathing, that which I dreamed of above all. “Oh, to breathe in that breeze,” I thought, “must be heaven on Earth.”

Car horns and a general bustle filled the air. She leaned against the railing a few feet from him. Her smile was bright in the sun. He felt the light begin to burn his back and he wished there wasn’t railing polluting his view.

“Was it to be known?” She asked.

    “I thought so.”

    “But it’s not now.”

    “Now it is to know.”

    “Know what?”

    “That whether or not it meant anything, that it was good.”

    “Don’t you want it to mean something?”

    “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if they see it or like it. Just that it was brilliant—that I was—if only for that instant.”

     They watched the city breathe awhile longer before getting up.

"But how will you know if no one sees it?"

"I figure I just will."

"They're not so bad, you know.""They're not so good, either."

She bumped him with her shoulder and smiled with her eyes. He forgot his head, and smiled back, suddenly glad to be with her in this city in the sun.