moral tension

always prided herself on
what she believed to be the
“right way to live,”
standing up straight, abiding
by the rules, going to church,
paying her parking ticket on
time, doing her 9 to 5 gig every
monday thru friday, always
on her soapbox & always
having it easy cause’ she never
got her morality put to the
test.

her favorite cousin asked her
to come visit the city &
though inside she was a bit
reluctant, she hadn’t seen her
cousin for such a long time &
the summer was the time for
having a little fun anyway
(so she told herself), so the
hop on the Amtrak was quick &
lo & behold, she arrived at
Penn Station
round 4:00 pm.

that night they went out on the
town, the group of them &
when crossing the street she
heard a scream---it was shrill
& short, as if it had quickly been
muffled---
looking in the direction of where
it had been coming from,
she saw with her very own eyes
a man repeatedly striking a
young woman in the face, whilst
yelling at her in between the blows---
they were more like hard slaps than
punches, but the sound that they made
she swore that she could hear them
over the sound of the cars & the
crowds.

while her friends continued to walk
as if nothing was happening, she
found herself slowing down &
as she watched the scene unfold,
it was over in real time much quicker
than the delay in her brain,
which seemed to vibrate in sync with
the increasingly rapid thump of her
heart.

with so many people around,
why wasn’t there one person trying to
stop this malicious individual who
was wailing on this woman?

while the watcher opened her mouth &
nothing came out, the man hitting the
young woman had stopped, pulling her
by the arm along behind him back into
the crowd---the woman who had been
hit was all disheveled & weeping.

the watcher didn’t know the relationship
between the two, but she knew that
what she’d seen had sent her into a moral
panic, wherein what she knew to be
“the right thing,” she simply had been
inadequately prepared to deliver a
response &
this kept her up at night
for the next week or so.

at home, away from the city,
the watcher didn’t walk around as
self-righteous as she had before,
in fact, it seemed to some who knew her
best,
that she had got right down off her
soapbox---
for she just couldn’t shake the memory
of that man slapping that woman so hard
that she could hear it across a crowded
street---
worse yet,
she couldn’t shake the idea that she hadn’t
done a thing to stop it.

and you want to think that she did something
about this---
you want to think
that when she was waiting for her son to come
back from returning videos at the shopping
center &
she heard a father who was sitting in a pickup truck
out in the parking lot
yelling at his teenage daughter,
you want to think
that she got out of her car &
she walked right up to his window &
told him to stop yelling at her,
before he swatted his daughter across the face
with the back of his hand,
making her begin to cry---
that’s what you want to think---
but she just watched,
just like she had
years ago in the city,
telling herself quietly
that her hands were tied &
that to do anything at all
would only escalate the situation.