At 11 AM, they paid their tabs—always exact change, counted twice—and walked to the park. They sat on a bench dedicated to a man named Harold who had died in 1992. No one knew Harold. They didn’t care.
Their evening entertainment: phone calls.
Not for leaves or birds. For the shadow. They timed how long it took the shadow to move from the bench’s left leg to the crack in the concrete two feet away. Bernard said fifty-three minutes. Arthur said forty-eight. Eugene said it didn’t matter because the sun was a liar and time was a human mistake. They argued for twenty minutes. That was the point. old men gangbang
Bernard, a former librarian, had lost his wife, his hair, and most of his patience. His entertainment was silent rage. He read the newspaper not for news but for misspellings. He circled them with a red pen, wrote angry letters to editors he never mailed, and folded each page into a precise, sharp-edged rectangle. By the end of breakfast, he had a stack of paper bricks. Arthur used them to level the cuckoo clock’s base.
Arthur, a retired watchmaker, had fingers that trembled until they touched something small. He spent his weeks disassembling and reassembling a single, stubborn cuckoo clock. It had not told the correct time since 1987. He didn’t care. For him, the entertainment was the struggle—the tiny screws, the brass gears that slipped from his tweezers, the way the wooden bird sometimes lurched out mid-afternoon and screamed for no reason. That was a good day. At 11 AM, they paid their tabs—always exact
On Saturday, they had a wildcard event. Last month, they tried to build a birdhouse. It collapsed. They laughed for the first time in years. Yesterday, they went to a casino. Bernard lost forty dollars and called it “tuition in human stupidity.” Arthur won twelve cents on a slot machine and kept the payout slip in his wallet. Eugene got lost in the parking garage for two hours and said it was the most interesting thing that had happened to him all year.
Arthur and Bernard never believed a word. But they listened. That was their real entertainment. They didn’t care
They sat in silence. The shadow of the oak tree moved from the bench leg to the crack. It took fifty-one minutes. Neither of them said a word about it.