Lawan

I'm sitting in this tiny restaurant and watching the gecko peaking out from behind 
the picture frame, and I notice the two freshly scrubbed girls by the window with 
their backpacks, jabbering in Danish and not noticing the boy on the street and the 
way he watches every forkful leave the plate. And I think, what on earth would 
bring two girls like that to this backwater of a forgotten town, and how did they 
survived the eleven-hour ride over the potholes and through the dry river beds 
where the bridges are washed away. 
Then the girls get all excited 'cause that elephant comes by like he does every 
afternoon, begging for table scraps 'cause there's no work for a logging elephant 
anymore. That gets me to thinking about how all the trees from around here have 
been snipped up into little strips for the folks back home with their hardwood 
floors, and then I remember that's why the bridges are washed away
and the houses too.
Then Lawan comes and takes my order, and I know she's older than me, old enough 
to be my mom, but she doesn't look a day past thirty, and she still has that 
beautiful thick black hair and that coy smile. And I wonder what it's like to 
marry a foreigner and live your whole life out here where nothing ever changes 
except the sun. 
It's lower now, and it's reflecting off the old war medals hanging by the picture. 
I glance over at Leonard back in the kitchen all busy with his pots and his dough 
and his one hand, and I think about lying in a sodden trench with my foot rotting 
away, and people shooting at me here and hating me back home, and just how stupid 
it all is.
Then the girls are leaving, and I watch them swish out the door, and the huge 
orange sun shimmering through all this dust sinks lower. 
I'm the last customer now, and I look over just in time to see Lawan lean into 
Leonard. I see the way they still look into each other's eyes after forty-some 
years, and I wonder why the hell I never found that. And I think this thing that 
they have - this lonely love in the last corner of this lost world 
this is the only good 
that has ever come
of war.