USA. A restaurant. I sat beside an American family of four.

No one spoke. Four small glowing phones. Four faces lit from below, the way we light a mask in the theater so the audience knows which spirit has arrived.

I thought: a curse. A quiet one. The bloodline is present and also gone.

The food came.

All four phones went dark, facedown, a little graveyard beside the ketchup.

They held hands. The father said twelve words I did not catch, and the child said amen as if it were a password that still worked.

Then they talked. Too loud. About a coach, a dent in a car, a teacher who was “so extra.” The phones stayed dead. The meal was a restored country.

I looked at my own glowing phone, the one I carry instead of a second sword, and I placed it facedown too. The table accepted this without comment.

When the plates were ruins, the phones rose again, gentle as livestock returning to a field.

The mother saw me watching and shrugged. “Waiting room,” she said. “The food is the actual visit.”

So tell me, America.

When a family sits together and says nothing to the living people in the chairs — are they rude, or are they holding their breath for the prayer?

And the glowing rectangle I bowed to, once, in my own pocket.

Is it a demon, or just the hallway you stand in until the door opens?

The waiting room.