His father used to do it to tease them.

“All it takes is a snap of the fingers,” he would say, “and just like that, people will disappear.”

When they were really young, this is when they would panic and grab his snap-ready fingers, holding them tight and pleading, “Don’t do it, Dad! Please don’t do it!”

“But the line is huge – maybe some of the people ahead of us would be the ones to go and we could move up…”

“No, don’t!”

When they got older, they weren’t so quick to block his untested practical magic.

“I could snap my fingers…”

“Wait, wait,” his older brother, Ben said. “Can you choose who disappears and who stays?”

“Well…”

“And what happens to them when they disappear?” Tom added.

“I don’t know who goes. And I don’t know where they go. I think they just stop existing altogether. But there’s always a chance it could work in our favor, right? The hostess said it would be an hour wait and they do have the best mac-and-cheese here…”

“They do!” said Ben.

“But what if our friends disappear?” asked Tom.

“Yeah. That wouldn’t be good. Don’t snap, Dad.”

“We’ll wait.”

When they were teenagers, they were more than eager to encourage the snapping. But something always prevented it.

“You’re sure you want me to snap my fingers?” he asked, looking first at his oldest son, then his youngest; the one with only one week of experience as a teen.

“It won’t do anything, anyway” said Ben.

“But what if it did?” asked Tom.

“It won’t.”

“I think it would be cool if it did…”

Heap, party of three, your table is ready…

“Well, I guess we won’t find out today,” his father said, tousling the younger one’s long, curl-happy brown hair, wishing the older one with the piercing, too-sad-for-his-age blue eyes would still allow playful touch without bristling.

Tom looked at his watch.

Six-thirty.

Four hours. Four hours they’d been waiting.

Then he looked at his brother.

The makeshift bandage around Ben’s forehead had begun to drip red. Tom watched blood bead down the pale green windbreaker, pausing for a moment at the turned-up seam before leaping into a growing pool on the gray tile floor.

Tom’s voice was raw from yelling. First to get his brother’s attention during the riot. Then at the EMTs for taking so damn long to respond to his cries for help. Finally, he targeted the nurses for seemingly random triage decisions. He imagined them as horrible poker players.

“Does a bleeding forehead beat a coughing spell and a broken leg? I forget.”

Ben’s eyes closed again and he slumped forward. Tom saved a broken nose by catching the folds of his jacket just before Ben’s face hit the floor. Then he wondered if he should have let his brother fall. Surely a bleeding forehead plus a broken nose would bump him up in the queue.

“Hang in there, Ben…just hang in there,” Tom said, his voice little more than a whisper. He propped his brother against the plastic chair, expecting another complaint from the elderly woman in the dirty tweed coat. But no sound came from her lips. No breath, either, Tom concluded as he looked into her lifeless eyes.

He thought about calling the nurse, but stopped mid-word, allowing little more than a grunt to escape. Instead, he leaned toward the chair, quickly scanned the room to see who was watching – no one – then lifted the woman’s left arm. He slid her coat sleeve up, fumbled for the plastic band circling her wrist.

The green letter “D” raced around the black band like a news-ticker on steroids.

“Shit,” he said.

Ben was a “C.”

Whoever traded the color-based triage system for letter grades was an idiot.

Ben would have been happy with a “C.” If he were coherent, he’d surely have made a joke about it, referencing his failed attempts at completing high school. This made Tom want to laugh, but instead he coughed.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “I wish there was a way I could speed this up.”

Ben’s right eye opened halfway, his cracked lips parted.

“Snap,” he rasped.

Tom was puzzled for a moment. Then he smiled, tousled his brother’s blood-encrusted hair, and held out his hand.

“Okay. Watch this...”