Bare legs and an oversized plaid hoodie. He leaned in the crook between the plastic seats and the metal bike rack, swaying while the bus trundled down the road. Snow melted into the strident jumble of his blond, red, and purple hair. Dripped down the back of his neck. Soaked into his hood. The driver never asked for payment, and none was provided. If everyone else shied toward the back seats, then it was by a gradual process of repeated embarkation and debarkation, and imperceptible to anything but a careful eye.
Outside it was dark but not yet late. Inside, under the fluorescence, the passenger was thin. Sharp. He stared up at colorful ads for local community colleges and pleasant reminders about the availability of free STI testing. Hands in his pockets. His legs, like two marble pillars gone blue with cold, quaked in time with the brakes and turns. Tensed, flexed, then relaxed—and tensed, flexed, then relaxed.
The bus passed Crudello’s, where a different man pulled a plate of pasta into his mouth by candlelight. They passed an industrial yard, where a different man opened the back of a trailer by the glow of a flashlight pinned to his vest. They passed a bus stop, where a different man read a paperback by the reflected light of the moon.
Thin patches of crystal blue frost sloughed off the passenger’s calves, like condensation running down a bottle, revealing the stubble of sloppy razor work and an incomplete lattice of scars underneath. A puddle formed about his boots. He kept his hands in his pockets.
The bus passed through downtown, where a different man sat drinking in the haze of a cheap lantern. Uptown, where a different man danced in neon vomit. They sped through the scattered houses of a nowhere neighborhood where many different men opened many different doors into the familiar light of identical kitchen bulbs.
‘Where you getting off?’ The driver adjusted his mirror.
He said nothing. Color returned to his body in stages. Beet red splotches bloomed on his thighs, like polka dots or the spreading stain of blood on white linen. Rosey blush crept up his neck. A glittering sheen of sweat replaced the dribbling rivulets of melting water.
‘You know where you’re going?’
‘Just a little while longer.’
On the highway, the bus fishtailed. The driver gnashed his teeth and leaned hard on the wheel. Rubber burned. Metal shrieked. The passenger leaned, or was pressed, further into the curvature of hard plastic. Everything tipped. The bus coasted sideways along three lanes of traffic.
Then the driver regained control. Exhaled. Released his white-knuckle death grip and set them back in their lane.
Nobody said a word, but everybody piled out at the next stop, darting for the door like a school of nervous fish. Only the passenger standing by the bike rack did not move, and as his fellows passed, some of them tried to slip him items—discreet, eyes cast down, from trembling hands. A crumpled five-dollar bill, which he did not take. A voucher for a free chicken sandwich, which he did not take. A bamboo coffee stirrer, which he accepted with a nod. Then there was only him and the driver. They left behind a group of frowning guppy faces by Apple radiance, to hire the rideshares of their preference, or else call upon doting mothers.
The bus progressed slowly through an office park where a different man closed a notebook and shut down his computer. The passenger’s body flushed the striking tone of a lobster’s carapace, and with some apparent effort he pulled a hand free to wipe his brow and tousle his hair. Sweat poured into his eyes. Vortices of steam issued forth from his ears—a shrill, persistent squeal from his flared nostrils.
He pulled the cord between distant stops and stepped off the bus in the median between a disused factory and an empty parking lot. Clouds like waves billowed around his body. He popped the coffee stirrer between his lips and set off walking. The burning crimson of his bare calves mellowed into the milky white of the ascending moon.
