A Situation...

Two white brothers, roughly 23 and 21 are in a fairly busy mall in what would be considered an upper middle class area of town. This mall is not located anywhere particular: no deep south and no urban northern city, just “any-town” USA. These two brothers would regularly waste time walking around the mall. And on this occasion, having been cooped up in their parents’ house over the Christmas holidays, walking the halls of the mall is great therapy. These brothers are close, good friends, but rarely do they ever see each other during the regular course of the week.

Our story begins in the mall where the brothers happen to be walking around with no obvious place to be or go. Now, immediately down the hallway, there is an Asian couple, probably in their thirties, with a small toddler who is walking, but not extremely well. The couple is sitting on a bench with their backs to the brothers, and at a first glance, almost anyone would suspect that both the man and women are relatively foreign to this environment, let alone this country. The two are even speaking in some sort of Asian language that is indecipherable to the two boys.

Now, as the brothers approach this tableau, they notice that the toddler has wandered away from the parents who are in the midst of an important conversation. The parents do not notice their child wandering away to their backs, and as moderate foot traffic is surrounding the child, the eldest brother feels it necessary to warn the parents about their child’s behavior. Not knowing where this sudden parental nature comes from, he senses that the child is in imminent danger. His first thought is to pick up the child and bring him out of harms way, but then realizes what this might look like in court, when the foreigners bring attempted kidnapping charges against him.
-Two unsuspecting Asian immigrants, having only recently moved to the U.S. to find the success unavailable to them in their suppressing communist homeland, had their only child abducted from underneath their noses as what seems to be a 23 year old white pedophile tried to take advantage of their naivety of American culture and kidnapped the child, hoping to raise her as a young Asian prostitute.

The older brother knows that even though his intentions are pure, perception in America is reality.

By the time this idea had retired itself from his thinking process, the scene has already worsened. Now, the toddler is in the middle of the highest foot traffic, and the parents are still unaware of their child’s departure. It is now evident that a direct rescue is not possible, however the child, as the older brother surmises, will be crushed any moment by the oncoming host of mall clientele. It is getting extremely dangerous, and the brother knows he must warn the parents as quickly as possible, however the vast vocabulary of the Japanese language he has never learned is now failing him. And so the brother, with only what seems seconds before the child is to be annihilated by pedestrian hordes, shouts in a wild panic to the Asian parents “Hey! Everybody Wang Chung Tonight!” while pointing at the child.


Have you ever been in a near fatal car accident and what you know is merely seconds seems like an eternity as your car hurls itself into the guard rail, and all you can think is “did I leave the gas stove on?”


Time stops for both brothers at that moment. Everyone is frozen in one place. Parents, brothers, child and marauding horde of shoppers all appear to understand that this might be the perfect time for the apocalypse. It even seems as though some mall manager has even decided to turn off the elevator music most common to malls, so that in this frozen picture of time, the whole world has became silent. If only a pin would drop at this moment, the fat man in line at the Cinnabon® might possibly drop dead of a heart attack.

What brakes this most life-like of all photographs is three-fold. Immediately the mother realizes her child is missing, and scanning her now desolate surroundings, leaps to her feet and with wild abandon grabs hold of her child. The frozen herd of patrons resumes their route with mild gasps and whispers. And as the film starts to get back to speed, “for this could only be a movie” the younger brother thinks, the father of the child stands and faces the two boys and in the purest parlance of English asks so clearly, “What did you just say to me?”

The older brother hopes that time would decide one pause wasn’t enough, and another one of those “time standing still” moments would be great to interject here, preferably long enough for the older brother to sneak he and his younger brother out of the scene and maybe go get an ICEE® and definitely forget this entire experience. But here they stand, and time decides it is an appropriate time to remain constant.



A Situation...
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