Seats for Everyone - Prose Poem/shortshort story

       It was an odd kind of restaurant, outdoors with no tables. But, there was a seat for everyone. For the elder folk like Harry D Hertzog and all the wizened Schlegels, the seats were low and benchlike – mostly for those that had shrunk in age, yet young enough to sit without backrests. Some of the families sat in the same chair—the Ermines had Lydia sit on her sister’s lap, who sat on her husbands, who felt only slight embarrassment at riding along on Uncle Boris’s good knee – though Uncle Boris felt no shame about sitting on top of his father and his father’s father for good measure. Even Lydia knew that at some point, soon, more family would arrive and her own lap would become a chair for someone else, probably her niece, Diane. The youngest guests, like newborn Sanya, had no need for seats at all  and sat on placemats on the ground. They were cute and stylish little settings too – colored with pink bears and taffeta flowers and a whirligig, circling. Herman’s chair was regal, or at least he believed it to be. It was wide and patterned with motifs of Greek columns – and to prove he loved the classics, flanked by pottery, although the embedded browning foliage failed to brighten up the bone chilling winds of the winter. Roming’s chair took the cake and took on the qualities of his favorite Cathedral, with the backrest devised of only superior, gothic arches. Mz. Miller’s seat had a pentagram laced through it while her husband, a Mason, had his own fraternal trademark painted there. Drick, who sat not far away, carved a cross so deeply into his seat that the Miller’s had no choice but to take his zealous art project as a warning to stay out of his way. With so many families in attendance, the restaurant should have been a-howl with laughter and champing, chomping conversation, but all the graveyard is quiet tonight.

©2015 Lex Vex